User Photos:

From Daniel Pead's email:

MP3 player in a home-made acrylic and aluminium case, with a Toshiba 2.5" hard drive scavenged from an elderly notebook. Note the fan (cannibalised) blowing directly on the regulator, which otherwise gets rather hot...

The drive sits in an aluminium cradle, with a couple of strips of foam tape for added cushioning, and is held in by high-tech rubber bands...

Pushbuttons, power LED (12V type with integral resistor) and misc. connectors from Maplin (www.maplin.co.uk). The 2.5" hard drive cable was from Farnell (www.farnell.co.uk) P/N 961-280.

This is designed for head-up use in a car with no display - so I recorded myself reading out each CD title and used these to implement a "talking index" mode - press the "index" button and the player starts "reading out" the disc titles, when you hear the one you want press "index" again and it starts playing.

To get files onto the hard drive, I modified an existing removable 3.5" HD rack to accept 2.5" drives, using a "44-to-40 + power" adapter cable from Farnell, P/N 96-1413.

Detail of the modified PCB from the rack (left) and the adapter cable (top):

The original ribbon cable header has been removed and replaced with a 40 way pin strip, so it can now accept either the 40-44 way adapter (top) or a normal 40 way cable (bottom).

The hard part was desoldering the old 40 way header!

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