[James Bellafaire] wanted a good looking old radio with a modern sound. Granted, you could hollow the case out and replace it with an iPod. Or you could convert the thing to an Internet radio. But where’s the fun in that?
[James] took a different approach. Part woodworking project, part Raspberry Pi project, and part microcontroller project, he wound up with a hard drive-based music player in a 1930’s case with knobs that control the playback.
Many of the hacks featured here are complex feats of ingenuity that you might expect to have emerged from a space-age laboratory rather than a hacker’s bench. Impressive stuff, but on the other side of the coin the essence of a good hack is often just a simple and elegant way of solving a technical problem using clever lateral thinking.
Take this project from [drtune], he needed to synchronize some lighting to an audio stream from an MP3 player and wanted to store his lighting control on the same SD card as his MP3 file. Sadly his serial-controlled MP3 player module would only play audio data from the card and he couldn’t read a data file from it, so there seemed to be no easy way forward.
His solution was simple: realizing that the module has a stereo DAC but a mono amplifier he encoded the data as an audio FSK stream similar to that used by modems back in the day, and applied it to one channel of his stereo MP3 file. He could then play the music from his first channel and digitize the FSK data on the other before applying it to a software modem to retrieve its information.
There was a small snag though, the MP3 player summed both channels before supplying audio to its amplifier. Not a huge problem to overcome, a bit of detective work in the device datasheet allowed him to identify the resistor network doing the mixing and he removed the component for the data channel.
He’s posted full details of the system in the video below the break, complete with waveforms and gratuitous playback of audio FSK data.
Continue reading “Synchronize Data With Audio From A $2 MP3 Player”
While we don’t think this qualifies as a “fail”, it’s certainly not a triumph. But that’s what happens when you notice something funny and start to investigate: if you’re lucky, it ends with “Eureka!”, but most of the time it’s just “oh”. Still, it’s good to record the “ohs”.
Gökberk [gkbrk] Yaltıraklı was staying in a hotel long enough that he got bored and started snooping around the network, like you do. Breaking out Wireshark, he noticed a lot of UDP traffic on a nonstandard port, so he thought he’d have a look.
Support libraries, good application notes, and worked examples from a manufacturer can really help speed us on our way in making cool stuff with new parts. Espressif Systems has been doing a good job with their ESP8266 product (of course, it doesn’t hurt that the thing makes a sub-$5 IOT device a reality). Only recently, though, have they started publishing completed, complex application examples. This demo, a networked MP3 webradio player, just popped up in Github, written by the man better known to us as Sprite_tm. We can’t wait to see more.
The MP3 decoder itself is a port of the MAD MP3 library, adapted for smaller amounts of SRAM and ported to the ESP8266. With a couple external parts, you can make an internet-connected device that you can point to any Icecast MP3 stream, for instance, and it’ll decode and play the resulting audio.
What external parts, you ask? First is something to do the digital-to-analog conversion. The application, as written, is build for an ES9023 DAC, but basically anything that speaks I2S should be workable with only a little bit of datasheet-poking and head-scratching. Of course, you could get rid of the nice-sounding DAC chip and output 5-bit PWM directly from the ESP8266, but aside from being a nice quick demo, it’s going to sound like crap.
The other suggested external IC is an SPI RAM chip to allow for buffering of the incoming MP3 file. WiFi — and TCP networks in general — being what they are, you’re going to want to buffer the MP3 files to prevent glitching. As with the dedicated DAC, you could get away without it (and there are defines in the “playerconfig.h” file to do so) but you’ll probably regret it.
In sum, an ESP8266 chip, a cheap I2S DAC, and some external RAM and you’ve got a webradio player. OK, maybe we’d also add an amplifier chip, power supply, and a speaker. Hmmm…. and a display? Or leave it all configurable over WiFi? Point is, it’s a great worked code example, and a neat DIY device to show your friends.
The downsides? So far, only the mono version of the libMAD decoder / synth has been ported over to ESP8266. The github link is begging for a pull request, the unported code is just sitting there, and we think that someone should take up the task.
In our search for other code examples for the ESP8266, we stumbled on three repositories that appear to be official Espressif repositories on Github: espressif, EspressifSystems, and EspressifApp (for mobile apps that connect to the ESP8266). The official “Low Power Voltage Measurement” example looks like a great place to start, and it uses the current version of the SDK and toolchain.
There’s also an active forum, with their own community Github repository, with a few “Hello World” examples and a nice walkthrough of the toolchain.
And of course, we’ve reported on a few in the past. This application keeps track of battery levels, for instance. If you’ve got the time, have a look at all the posts tagged ESP8266 here on Hackaday.
You couldn’t possibly want more resources for getting started with your ESP8266 project. Oh wait, you want Arduino IDE support?
Thanks [Sprite_tm] for the tip.
Let’s say you use an SD card-base portable audio recorder for work – doing an interview, perhaps. Things go well until one day, you turn the recorder off before stopping the recording. Without pressing that big red Stop button, the file doesn’t close, and you’re left with a very large 0kB file on the SD card. How do you get it back? There are tools that will do it for you, but they cost money. You can do it yourself with a hex editor, though, and it’s actually pretty easy.
The software required for this feat of data recovery is Roadkil’s Disk Imager to dump all the bits on the SD card to an image file, the free version of ISO Buster to show the block addresses and length of each file, and the hex editor of your choice. The process starts as simply an experiment for hot to create an MP3 file by cutting and pasting bits into a hex editor. A good file was found in the hex editor, copied to a new file, and played. Everything works so far; great.
For the actual data recovery, a spreadsheet was created to make an educated guess as to where the lost file should be. Starting at this address, about 90MB of data was copied into a new hex editor window. This is where the recovery hit a snag. Because the SD card was plugged into a Mac before, a bunch of data was written on the card. This went into the first available place on the disk, which just happened to be the header of the lost MP3 file.
That’s not a problem; there’s already the header from an MP3 file sitting in a hex editor from the first experiment to see if this was possible. By copying a few hundred bytes to the front of the lost file, the file was corrected just enough that an MP3 player could reconstruct the file.
It’s not perfect – the first fifty seconds of the interview was garbled. The rest of the interview was saved, though, and that’s much better than losing the entire thing. Thanks [Lewin] for sending this one in.
[Pat]’s friend got a Pono for Christmas, a digital audio player that prides itself on having the highest fidelity of any music player. It’s a digital audio device designed in hand with [Neil Young], a device that had a six million dollar Kickstarter, and is probably the highest-spec audio device that will be released for the foreseeable future.
The Pono is an interesting device. Where CDs have 16-bit, 44.1 kHz audio, the Pono can play modern lossless formats – up to 24-bit, 192 kHz audio. There will undoubtedly be audiophiles arguing over the merits of higher sampling rates and more bits, but there is one way to make all those arguments moot: building an MP3 player out of an oscilloscope.
Digital audio players are limited by the consumer market; there’s no economical way to put gigasamples per second into a device that will ultimately sell for a few thousand dollars. Oscilloscopes are not built for the consumer market, though, and the ADCs and DACs in a medium-range scope will always be above what a simple audio player can manage.
[Pat] figured the Tektronicx MDO3000 series scope sitting on his bench would be a great way to capture and play music and extremely high bit rates. He recorded a song to memory at a ‘lazy’ 1 Megasample per second through analog channel one. From there, a press of the button made this sample ready for playback (into a cheap, battery-powered speaker, of course).
Of course this entire experiment means nothing. the FLAC format can only handle a sampling rate of up to 655 kilosamples per second. While digital audio formats could theoretically record up to 2.5 Gigasamples per second, the question of ‘why’ would inevitably enter into the minds of audio engineers and anyone with an ounce of sense. Short of recording music from the master tapes or another analog source directly into an oscilloscope, there’s no way to obtain music at this high of a bit rate. It’s just a dumb demonstration, but it is the most expensive MP3 player you can buy.
When you get that itch to build something, it’s difficult to stop unless you achieve a feeling of accomplishment. And that’s how it was with [Rohit’s] boombox build.
He started out with a failing stereo. He figured he could build a replacement himself that played digital media but his attempts at mating microcontrollers and SD cards was thwarted. His backup plan was to hit DX for a cheap player and he was not disappointed. The faceplate he found has slots for USB and SD card, 7-segment displays for feedback, and both buttons and a remote for control. But this little player is meant to feed an amplifier. Why buy one when you can build one?
[Rohit] chose ST Micro’s little AMP called the TDA2030 in a Pentawatt package (this name for a zig-zag in-line package is new to us). We couldn’t find stocked chips from the usual suspects but there are distributors with singles in the $3.50-5 range. [Rohit] tried running it without a heat sink and it gets hot fast! If anyone has opinions on this choice of chip (or alternatives) we’d love to hear them.
But we digress. With an amp taken care of he moved onto sourcing speakers. A bit of repair work on an upright set got them working again. The bulky speaker box has more than enough room for the amp and front-end, both of which are pretty tiny. The result is a standalone music player that he can be proud of having hacked it together himself.
