How-To: Make your own MP3 player

We got a whiff of MAKE's Daisy a while back, but now we've finally managed to get our hands on one of these open source MP3 player kits. Today we'll whip out our soldering iron and show you how things shake out. The kit isn't dirt cheap at $115 each, but it's completely open source and flexible - making it ideal for a SunDIY afternoon (har), or for that soldering-iron-weilding open source fanatic in your life. Read on!

We grabbed our usual assortment of tools to make the board. Our fine tip 15 watt soldering iron, a set of "helping hands," a tube of solder some pliers and pair of diagonal or flat cutters. Of course, we always keep a multi-meter handy.

Take a few minutes to lay out all of your parts. Grab the instruction sheet and make sure you got everything. Once it's all accounted for, you'll be ready to start building. The instructions include just enough information to get you going. The big chip is the PIC controller that runs the show; it provides the control interface and feeds the data to the decoder chip. The Daisy is an odd marriage of SMD decoder chip and monstrous PIC controller.

The real star is this little guy. It's a MP3 / WAV decoder and headphone amp all in one. Soldering this chip to the board is the single most difficult, but important part of the build.

To mount the SMD chip, we tinned the solder pads with some solder. If you've got some liquid flux, your life will be easier later on. If you don't, just don't cook the solder too much as you tin the pads. Be sparing, it doesn't take much.

Yeah, yeah, we know this looks ugly, but we prettied it up later. Place the chip on the pads and heat each pin to melt the solder onto it. While the rest of the board is clear, make sure you've got a solid connection at each pin. You can check them with your multimeter - we put one probe on the top of the lead, and the other at the tip of the solder pad. If you're picky, you can use some desoldering braid to remove some of the excess solder.

There are two crystals in the kit. The marked crystal is 24.576Mhz, while the unmarked is 10Mhz. They're not polarized, so they can be mounted in either direction, just be sure to put them in the right locations.

After each component is soldered on, we trim each lead. We've found that flat cutter like these leave duller edges and help reduce flying bits.

If you haven't worked with resistor networks before, you'll be missing a vital bit of information. The dot on the end indicates the common lead. This corresponds with the bar on the resistor nets in the instruction diagram.

With long components, we usually solder one lead, and position the part while it's still hot. After that, finishing the job is easy. (To ensure good connections, make sure you heat the lead, then melt the solder on the hot tip/part lead.)

The headphone jack has fairly large leads. Since it's another surface mount component, we tinned the pads before mounting it. You can get away without doing it -- in fact, we didn't bother when we installed the SD card jack.

Make note of the position of the notch on the DIP jack for the PIC controller. It won't effect operation, but the notch indicates the pin numbering. It's good to be in the habit of following the standard.

The symbol for a diode looks like a triangle with a bar across one corner. The bar indicates the cathode of the diode -- the line on the end of the diode also indicates the cathode. Make sure you orient these in the proper direction before soldering them down.

The shape of the leads on the .01uf capacitors is by far the most annoying part of the build. They are too wide for all of the mounting holes.

The fix is simple enough. Grab a pair of pliers and carefully straighten the leads. Just don't torque on the lead near the body of the capacitor!

Once that's done, the biggest pain in the neck is placing all the caps in the various board locations. We noted a botched stencil mask job here - the labels for c11 and c12 overlap with the solder pads for the decoder chip. Ah well, we got the idea.

Mounting the voltage regulator is easy, just spread the leads a bit and insert it. The flat face corresponds with the stencil on the board.

This 10uf capacitor requires a bit of a bending job. Make sure to orient the leads correctly before you bend them.

The cap doesn't quite fit between the resistor net and the chip socket. We bent the network over a bit and made sure it didn't interfere with chip insertion.

The biggest flaw in the instructions has to do with the LEDs. LEDs are polarized - The instruction sheet only notes the flat side of the LED to indicate polarity -- but the small LEDs that come with the kit lack a flat side. The short lead on the LED also indicates the cathode. So insert the LEDs with the short lead at the flat notation of the LED on the board. Careful now!

When you try to install the PIC controller chip, you'll find that the leads are a bit wider than the socket. This is always the case with DIP hardware. To fix it, place the edge on a flat surface and push down gently. The idea is to bend all the pins uniformly.

We powered our Daisy up with 5v from our bench top PSU. (Modified PC power supply) We noted some noise from the PSU in the sound output - battery power prevents this.

To use the Daisy, you'll have to format either a SD / MMC card or a miniSD or microSD card in a SD adapter. (We scored a 256MB miniSD with adapter for $10, but you internet ferrets can probably do better.) Once we formatted the card to FAT32 with an external card reader, we loaded up some MP3s and powered the Daisy up in it's default configuration (no jumpers -- it would have been nice if the kit included some in the kit). The player started playing immediately at a decent volume. The sound quality is actually very good. We'd say that the kit is a medium difficulty build -- the SMD chip is the hardest part. After that, it's pretty easy.

The most interesting feature of this mp3 player is the flexibility of the configuration. Thanks to all the inputs and jumper configurations, the player can be customized to perform in most ways you can think of. We wish it included a USB port to allow the memory card to be easily accessed. For now you'll need something else to load your songs with. The various d-pins are temporarily grounded to tell the player what to do: track, volume, pause, etc.

Alright, we built it, now we'll tell you what we think about it.

The good:

• Open source -- you can modify the firmware (especially with in-circuit programming).
• Lots of room to grow with that monstrous new PIC controller.
• The decoder chip sounds great.
• Serial controllable.
• Flexible from the get go -- you can choose the right mode and integrate it with other projects.

The bad:

• You need a PC and a card reader to format your card to FAT32
• No USB interface for loading data.
• Should include jumpers for the price -- they're cheap, but can be a pain to hunt down.
• No display interface.

What we'd love from Daisy 2:
If it was a full on surface mount project. The board would be smaller and the component cost could be reduced. Include a die cut transparency to apply solder with and cook it on some aluminum foil over the stove. In it's current state it's a neat project, but if all you want is music, a first-gen generation iPod nano doesn't cost much more -- and has serial control available through the dock connector. But you didn't buy this thing because you wanted a nano, obviously, you bought it because you wanted to build your own MP3 player just like Jobs and Gates. Well, now you can!

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Thanks for the overview.... This kit is pretty much perfect for what I want... I had (had, of course being the opperative word) one of those MP3 players made by "cheap Chinese labor" that didn't last a whole year before certain critical parts started breaking off the board (headphone jack, volume up switch), and decided to try building my own with REAL components, instead of those cheap, crappy surface-mounted pieces of crap, and came upon this kit.

Even though it has one or two SMD components, the headphone jack can be fixed by carefully drilling the board (I'm making a custom case for this thing out of a bakelite Dual-Gang wall box with a brass plate for the main cover, and a hole in the side to allow easy access for the SD card (I'll have a hinged door made of brass covering it when I don't need to get at the SD card. The top plate will be drilled and stamped for all the switches for volume control, power on, etc.

I'll try to post pics when I'm done. :)

P.S. I'm an experienced electronics technician who is currently studying to become an electronics engineering technologist.

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[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2006 6:53PM]

Nice work... would've been nice to see a size comparison.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2006 7:36PM]

It looks to be a little chunky, but hey, it's homebuilt, right?

If you want to compared sizes, though, just look at the SD card and the headphone cable. It looks like an iPod set of headphones, so it's a pretty standard size.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 20th 2006 2:58AM]

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[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2006 7:38PM]

i would rather let a chinese worker do the hard work and get it for a cheap price. With all that work involved and at high inflation rates I'd probably sell it for around $400. But that kit is too damn expensive.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2006 7:47PM]

Thanks, that's a really nicely done tutorial!


If you feel like playing a bit more with MP3 player construction, check out Minty MP3:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~ladyada/make/minty/index.html
It's a simple MP3 player built to fit an Altoids tin :)

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2006 8:01PM]

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[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2006 10:07PM]

No offense to those who posted above, but if you have even minimal sottering skills than this isn't difficult. In fact I find it fascinating that there have been so many recent guides in magazines and online on how to build your own MP3 player. Such endevours are fun projects for those who've got time, if I were still in High School I would easily choose something like this as a school project.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2006 8:29PM]

I've always had the desire to find a mp3 kit that used a standard hdd of some type. Not sure how much power they use or if it's even feasible, but I've got an old RCA mp3 player (maybe 5 years old) and it just seems to have a standard laptop hdd in there. Be cool to be able to run one of those 750gb seagate barracudas. Kit would have to include a case for the hdd as well, but meh, just a quick thought.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2006 8:56PM]

thanks wil!

folks, keep in mind that this is a *kit* for learning. you get it, you build it, you learn, you 100% own it - it's one of the only open source mp3 player kits in the world and i'd like to see more open source hardware projects get out there in kit form.

for the fellow who only wants a low paid chinese worker to do everything for them... i hope your grandkids enjoy your choices :)

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2006 9:46PM]

I like the apple earbuds. They give it the nice "opensourcy" feel.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2006 11:01PM]

Solder.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 20th 2006 3:36AM]

The GP2X isn't THAT more expensive and lets you do just that ... and a tad bit more :-)

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 20th 2006 8:44AM]

There are MUCH easier ways to solder that SMT chip that end up being a lot neater.

Tin ONE pad, sit the chip on it, melt the solder and press it down. Now it will be held in place AND sitting flat. Do the same for the opposite corner, and then the other two corners. Now you know it's sitting flat, lined up straight, and all you have to do is put a little solder on each pin. It will be quicker and look a lot nicer.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 9th 2007 6:46PM]

with my soldering skills around 0 i'll stick to close source hardware with open source rockbox.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 20th 2006 11:24AM]

Does everybody forget things so fast in the web? A few months ago I read about another open source mp3 player, http://www.ladyada.net/make/minty/ , right here in Engadget. In any case, I prefer the Minty player because it is smaller, it is ready to run from standard batteries, it has a USB port, although I think it's only Fat16.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 20th 2006 8:20PM]

me no like soldering irons. me burn self many times. me have pictures to prove it. me show you pictures. me no do make your own mp3 player. me no want to burn any more.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 21st 2006 9:16AM]

> If someone actually buys this
> they have down syndrome. Look at this site.
> http://www.chinavasion.com

Obviously you don't "get it". Try putting the video games down for a few minutes and use your imagination for a change.