Development boards are perfect for empowering makers to easily get up and running on their projects, as they provide all the necessary tools and resources needed for quickly getting started with any given task. For those new to the maker world or experienced developers wanting an update on all that’s available out there right now, we have created this blog post collection in order to highlight amazing development boards with tips, tricks, and tutorials.
Home made, open source mp3 Player. The main goal of this project is to create an open design for a portable MP3 player, in both hardware and software. The secondary goal of this project is to make it as simple to construct, and as cheap, as possible. The design is based around the AVR Butterfly from Atmel. Photo and Link.
Another homebrew MP3 project from awhile back…Procyon MP3 is a hardware MPEG 1 Layer 3 (MP3) audio player which supports user-controlled playback of MP3 files stored on a typical IDE hard disk connected to the device. With the emergence of MP3 as a popular standard for storing, playing, and exchanging music, droves of electronics and computer companies have introduced both portable and desktop MP3 player devices into the consumer market. The rise of MP3 has also produced dozens of personal engineering projects like this one. Link.
This isn’t a new project, but one I really like- a Hitachi TRK-8200HR + Fujitsu Stylistic 1200 Color Tablet PC running a MediaCar interface with custom skin in portrait mode to simulate a Boombox. The housing is an actual Boombox and it looks great. The Maker can also record radio right to the system too. Nicely done! Link.
Built as a one-man-band musical instrument- The Phoney Controller consists of a telephone housing, four Force Sensing Resistors (FSRs), an Analog Devices ADXL202 two-dimensional accelerometer, a BASIC Stamp II (BSII) microcontroller, a stupid “on-off” switch, and a cool LED! I am essentially using the BSII as a MIDI sequencer. All sounds at this point have to be generated from an external MIDI synthesizer. The FSRs and the 2D accelerometer are used to control various aspects of the sequencer. Link.
The Juicebox is an embedded computer designed to form the core of a simple ebook/MP3 player device. This little guy can do a lot and here’s a site that has pretty much everything you’ll need to start hacking at it. For $50 or under it might be a good platform for projects, but I think the Gameboy SP has more things you can do with them (We have a great article on this in issue 02!) Link.
