Overview:

We have created a fully autonomous, portable, high capacity MP3 player based on a kit constructed by PJRC.  Natively, this product supports both standard and laptop hard drives.  In order to improve it, we modified the functionality to support ATAPI devices. 

 

The parts we used to construct this MP3 player are as follows:

 

 

Figure 1 PJRC MP3 Player Kit in Custom Case

 

Motivation:

The PJRC kit is capable of using both standard IDE and laptop hard drives.  These disks must be formatted using a FAT32 file system and have MP3 files copied to them by means of a laptop or desktop computer.  It is cumbersome to connect/disconnect, discover etc. a new hard disk each time a new collection of MP3 files is desired.  To improve the ease of playing MP3 files, a removable disk, such as a CD-ROM, is better suited to this task than a fixed hard disk.  In order to accommodate a removable disk, this kit's firmware must be updated to use ATAPI instead of standard ATA\IDE.  Normally one plays MP3 files in a car or on a home entertainment center using a personal computer or laptop as a MP3 decoder.  Using this portable player, one only has to have a removable medium and audio cables to connect it to an amplifier system or use head phones.

 

Figure 2 PJRC Kit with IDE Drive and ATAPI CDROM

 

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