Reader Rob requested this hack back in November so I jumped on it when it showed up in my RSS reader. Although Mike Kruckenberg preferred the sound of his SoundDock to the iPod HiFi, he was disappointed that it didn’t feature an auxiliary input. He decided to crack the box open and mount his own aux port. Bose doesn’t use the same pin numbers, but Mike was able to figure out the left, right, and ground. He still needs to do a little more digging to figure out how to turn on the dock without having the iPod in place. I think a nice hack would be building a dummy plug that appeared to the dock as an iPod but only has a line-in jack.

[via Digg]

Continue reading “Aux Input For Bose SoundDock” →

[Andrew Pollack]’s supersized iPod remote control isn’t the most technical hack around, but I’m sure his 87 year old father-in-law is very appreciative. He’s losing his vision rapidly and is finding it difficult to operate a tape player when listening to audiobooks. Andrew decided that the solution was to load up an iPod with a lot of books and then make a large tactile control for it. He purchased a JBL On Stage II sound dock with remote. The dock has built in speakers and keeps the iPod charged while in use. He put the remote in a larger box and connected buttons with unique shapes and high contrast colors. This makes the controls easy to remember, even if you can’t read the labels.

I usually don’t post Engadget material since they get more traffic than us, but with all the E3 coverage going on I wanted to make sure Will’s iPod dock project got the attention it deserves. Will had originally planned on doing this all in one post, but there ended up being so much material we had to do it in four. The idea was to breakout all of pins in the dock connector into usable connections: everything from line-out to USB to serial. Even if you don’t have (or even like) an iPod you might find this project interesting because it’s really a tutorial on board design in disguise. Part 1 covers how to create a new component in EAGLE. Part 2 has how to create the schematic. Part 3 shows how to generate and tweak the board layout. Finally in Part 4 he goes through the process of actually etching the boards. What’s next? Well a decent case would be nice; which seems like perfectly good excuse for Will to build vacuum table. Look for that in the future.

Continue reading “How-to: IPod Super Dock” →

[josh mason] is in the process of converting his iTrip mini FM transmitter (cache) so that it will work with any device. The iTrip uses the iPod’s accessory port for power and control. The acc. port is what Apple used before settling on a standard dock connector. After he cracked open the iTrip, Josh compared it to an earlier hack we featured and noticed that the wiring was backwards which explains why the acc. port devices won’t work on different generations. He’s got a new headphone jack attached but still needs to construct a power supply. If he wasn’t making the device universal, he could get 3.3V out of his nano’s dock port.

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[Francisco] had one simple goal with this project: access every pin in the dock connector. If you want to start experimenting with the iPod this will come in very handy. Francisco has provided a PDF schematic ready to etch. I’m surprised SparkFun isn’t selling something like this already.

Continue reading “IPod Dock Splitter” →

Usually when someone asks me how to build a USB charger I point them to Jason Striegel’s USB battery v2. It’ll work for a lot of things that only need 5V. Unfortunately [ian] has a 3G firewire iPod so he decided to build a switch mode power supply to generate the 8-30V required by firewire. The device is powered by 3 AA batteries and uses a PIC 12F683 microcontroller to regulate the output voltage. The device can power a dead 3G iPod, but it can’t charge it, so Ian is looking for some input from the community. Some have already suggested using FETs with a lower turn on voltage.

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Most factory radios in cars don’t include a line in. alfaGato decided he wanted to integrate an iPod into his system, but wanted to maintain the factory functions. His Saab 9-3 came with GM’s OnStar system (not activated) which he thought would make a decent in road into the radio. His instructions should work for most radios with a factory cellphone integration option. He opened the radio and cut the traces for the phone input to get separate left and right channels. These were wired to the external CD changer input. He didn’t have the factory changer and the phone input also had amplification on the line that would interfere with the iPod. He designed a circuit with two possible inputs: iPod connector or AUX. The circuit is designed to mute the inputs if OnStar is activated. The circuitry is contained within a Saab factory phone mount with an iPod holder attached to it. Check out alfaGato’s blog dedicated to the project and our previous auxiliary input projects.

Continue reading “IPod Integration For Factory Radios” →