3 yr old's MP3 player

nbw

Senior Member
My 3 year old daughter wanted a "music box" like her older brother's, so I have made this for her (for Xmas).

It's a 28x1 with serial LCD to a 24x2 LCD, connected to a VMUSIC2 module and a quaint old 128Mb usb drive. It has a stereo amplifier, with bass and treble, salvaged from an old PC peripheral. It has 4 ohm speakers and drives from 5V, so is a good fit for this project. Power is from 2 x 3.7V 2200mAh laptop batteries, stepped up using a LM2623. It has a ladybird on-off switch, and a second for sending the sound to headphones (volume limited of course!). The little door at the front (will be locked!) is to remove the drive and add new songs when required. The caterpillar features numerous LEDs:

orange - play-all mode
green - random mode
blue - battery getting low
red - playing song

The 5 buttons beep gently when pressed, and control:

red - battery check - lets her know when to ask Daddy to recharge (it auto shuts everything down if the batteries are lower than 2.8V, to protect them)
purple - play / pause
yellow - back to previous track
white - skip to next track
orange - switch between random / play-all modes

All of the tracks, filenames etc are written to the usb drive along with the tracks themselves. The display shows the track elapsed time while it's chugging along. The whole code comes in at a whisker under 2000 bytes.
 

Attachments

nbw

Senior Member
And a couple more... moderators, wouldn't it be good if you could loosen it some posters could add more than just 2 pix???
 

Attachments

techElder

Well-known member
Great Job! I know the feeling of getting something that complex working.

That's one little girl that's going to have a big surprise. :)
 

nbw

Senior Member
cheers all. Yes, anything "cool" her older brother has, Ciara wants... and Dad gets to make it :) It didn't take very long to do the software because I learned a fair bit from Finn's one. This one I played around with writing files, tracknames etc to disk: all up about 5 hours in the code. The serial LCD chip made things a little easier for the LCD. The hardware cutting / sanding / dremeling / painting took about 40 hours. Plus a little bit extra for pouring and sipping Kilkenny while debugging code :)

Next thing is a wireless armed cricket scoreboard for Finn, or to delve deeper into building a reasonable frequency counter. Either that, or mow the lawns......!!
 

nbw

Senior Member
BTW, by "armed" I mean he will wear a small band on his forearm with the 08M, TX module, 5 push buttons for +1, +2, +4, -1 run, and swap player buttons. He presses those when he scores runs (or loses a run for hitting the ball into the garage near the car, -40 runs for knocking over Dad's beer). His "arm" sends the signal to a box on the side of the house, where an RX module, 40X, and 6 x 4543 ICs display our scores on very large (4 in high!) LCD 7-segment digits. Mum will cheer accordingly, Ciara will be playing annoying Abba songs on her pink music box at full volume.
 

westaust55

Moderator
And a couple more... moderators, wouldn't it be good if you could loosen it some posters could add more than just 2 pix???
My solution on the photos has been to create a colalge with several photos in the one image. Two or three per image = 4 or 6 in the one post.

Great work on the mp3 player project :)
 
Last edited:

nbw

Senior Member
Fair enough, I'll give that a go when I've finished Finn's new cricket scoreboard or the frequency counter, whichever comes first...........
 
Top