Let There Be Music

I needed to be able to play MP3 files as part of a larger project I'm working on.  I did a quick search on the Internet for embeddable MP3 player chips and circuits, but everything seemed a bit too expensive or too much work.  It was around then I saw Hack a Day's post pointing me to Gadget Gangster's Instructables article Adding MP3 to your project for $3.00.  Being the cheapskate that I am, $3 sounds great to me!

A quick trip to eBay and I had two of these “mini-clip” players on the way.  I figured I should get an extra just in case I damage one while fooling around.   Before I began hacking the player, I tested it out to make sure it was operational and get an idea of how it behaves.  One of the things I discovered is that the USB interface is pretty flaky (at least when connected to a Linux system), so it was much easier and faster to transfer files onto it by writing directly to the MicroSD card using a card reader.

Player liberated from its case

I cracked one open and took a look to see what it would take to hook into it.  One of the things I wanted to do is to be able to move this from prototype to finished product, or between projects.  The Instructables article showed discrete wires soldered to the board, which I could have brought out to some kind of connector.  After a bit of thought, I realized I could use a small 10 pin IDC connector and ribbon cable to allow me to plug it into a nice wire-wrappable header.  And with the extra pins, I could also supply power, and even pick off the audio!

After some minor surgery

First, I removed the power wires and also carefully removed the surface mount audio connector.  Somewhere in my lab I have the parts to build the IDC/ribbon cable assembly, but I found a pre-made one in my parts bin so I just cut it in half and started peeling back a few of the wires.

IDC cable ready for action

 I started by connecting to the power pads (mostly because they were big and easy to get to).  This also conveniently allowed me to set the amount of overhang from the connector to the board.  I then cut and stripped the remaining three wires for that side and landed them onto the pads where the audio connector used to be.  Next, I flipped over the board and cut each of the wires to length and soldered them to the center of each button pad.

Wires landed on board

Now with all the wires hooked up, it's time to test it out and see if I fried anything.  I wired up a 2x10 header on my main project (more about that in a future post) and wrote some quick code to “push” the buttons.

At home in the new project

I'm using a PIC18F4550 in this project, and using my favorite language – assembly. I love the challenge of hand-tuning code to make it as small and fast as possible, and that's not so easy with the PIC18F's!  Anyway, I wanted to drive the switch outputs open collector style, so for the switch outputs I initialize the ports by setting the switch TRIS bits and clearing the LAT output bits.  Then when I want to “press” a switch, I clear the the corresponding TRIS bit which drives the output low, and set a tick countdown timer.  When that timer expires about 200ms later, I set all the TRIS bits again to “float” the outputs and release all the switches.

After checking to make sure the software was doing as I expected, I connected the MP3 player to the main project, powered it up, and out came music!  I then tested each of the switch functions, and the player responded as expected, pausing, playing, skipping forward and back, etc.  To my surprise, everything worked as expected.  The player has been working without any hiccups for several months, despite powering it with 5v instead of it's expected 3.7v battery, and shorting the switch inputs to ground instead of the other contact (although I expect that is the way it is wired anyway).

I would like to thank Gadget Gangster for sharing his cool tip to re-purpose cheap MP3 players for use in embedded projects, and Hack a Day for bringing it to my attention.