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.

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2,000 songs. Impossibly small. Reeks of fish.

There is something very fishy going on with this conversion of a 4GB iPod nano to an 8GB nano. To start, the obligatory “new capacity” screenshot isn’t provided. Next, it is almost too simple: just piggyback the flash chips on top of each other. Wait, weren’t the chips in the 4GB nano mounted on a daughter card? ([Omikron]’s photos of the daughter card in his 4GB nano) The 2G version had flash chips on the main board, but those were Toshibas not these Samsung chips. There are really basic instructions provided that encourage you to buy a broken nano on eBay and salvage the necessary chips. If that seems a little hard, the author has plenty of the correct memory chips on hand and is willing to upgrade your nano, for a fee. This page is mirrored in an auction. What kind of person has a pile of 2GB iPod flash chips on hand? I don’t know, but they seem to have sold a lot of 4GB iPods in the last month. I wonder what capacity the iPods really were

Since the time it was first featured on MAKE, Steve Chapman has continued to develop his iPod breakout dock. The dock provides all of the possible connections that could be made through the 30-pin connector. Of interest is the iPod’s serial interface. I had seen a break down of the control codes before, but Steve has taken the time to develop a serial application that he can use to test the different commands. Now that he knows a little more about the interface he’s started programming a microcontroller to use it.

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[sbeam] was really excited about his latest acquisition: an Amstrad CPC 464. This model has a tape deck instead of a floppy drive. sbeam had no way of transferring software on his computer to the Amstrad. He looked around and found the PlayTZX tool. PlayTZX reads a .tzx tape backup and generates a WAV file. sbeam dumped these conversions onto his iPod Shuffle and used a car cassette adapter to play them in the Amstrad’s deck. Nice new school solution for old hardware.

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I’d found plenty of documentation on the iPod’s dock pinout and serial based remote interface, but never a decent explanation of how to actually implement it. Finally I found BigCookie’s iPod to T&A remote control adapter tucked away in the iPod Linux wiki. He built the controller to receive remote signals from his T&A audio receiver and then translate them to control the iPod. He’s got schematics and code for a a PIC16F628 microcontroller. I’m guessing the code could be adapted to support almost any input method the PIC supports.

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For this week’s Nano Hack we will cover how to get power off your iPod Nano’s battery. Power can be useful when you need to run other small low power devices in conjunction with the Nano. These devices can be small circuits, lights, etc. In next week’s installment we will use the power we draw to power a glowing sleeve for the iPod Nano.

What you will need:
– an iPod connector cable to cannibalize (we used a Dock Connector to USB 2.0 + FireWire)
– a multimeter
– a soldering iron
– some sort of thin knife or miniature flat head screwdriver to pry open the connector

Continue reading “Thursday Nano Hacks: Getting Power From Your Nano” →

My 5G iPod arrived yesterday. We previously talked about automatically converting downloaded TV to iPod video. I had found [mike]’s comment odd since it said the iPod doesn’t support Videora’s H.264. Odd because I followed Videora’s conversion guide and that’s the setting they used. Well, it’s true. I was successful using the “SP/320×240/768KbpsStereo/128Kbps” setting Mike suggested. This issue has been acknowledged with the release of iPod Converter 0.81. I haven’t had a chance to test the new version which features more resolutions (not guaranteed to be usable). My Azureus setup seems be working even though the converter coughs up a .NET error every so often.

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