Robert Brown sent in his iPod hd adapter. Sure, you could buy an Addonics 1.8″ toshiba to ide adapter for $15; but he didn’t mind soldering up the 50 wires to connect his drive to a USB IDE adapter. To finish it out, he put everything into an enclosure and added an eject button.
ipod hacks171 Articles
IPod Charger In A 9V
[erck] built an iPod charger inside of a 9V battery. I’m actually more interested in the two reference links he included with the project. The first is Sijosae’s gallery of headphone amps. He’s built over 130, there are other projects included as well. The second is Ted’s iPod Battery Pack which links to almost every DIY and commercial iPod charger on the web.
Aux Input For Bose SoundDock
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]
Giant IPod Remote For The Visually Impaired
[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.
How-to: IPod Super Dock
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.
ITrip Mini Universal Mod
[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.
IPod Dock Splitter
[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.
