MAKE open source MP3 player (daisy) – getting started guide

Music Technology
MAKE open source MP3 player (daisy) – getting started guide

Daisy Mp3 2 20061126
I had some time this weekend to assemble my Daisy MP3 player kit. This amounted to 3 or 4 hours of soldering everything together, making a few mistakes, and working around some minor problems. Now I’m listening to the Make podcast on my first open source MP3 player, and I’m happy to say my feeble soldering skills got me by. If you’re a little new to this stuff and you’ve been wondering how to put this bag of parts together, don’t sweat it. I’ll take you through some of the tricky spots and you can share your experiences and questions in the comments.What You Should Have Before Starting

Soldering Iron: There are great ones. There are crappy ones. I think mine doubles as a wood burner. You’ll probably be a happier person if you get the best one you can afford, but if you’ve got something with a relatively pointy tip and it gets hot enough to melt solder then you can probably make it work. Beware that the cheap irons tend to get really hot. You can counter this by constantly cleaning it on a wet sponge, keeping a layer of fresh solder on the tip, and turning it off when you aren’t using it for a few seconds. Start using it right away once it’s warmed up enough to melt the solder you are using. You don’t want it to heat up too much or you risk overheating a connection and delaminating a trace from the board.

Solder: Get the thinnest rosin core solder you can find. It should be thinner than the width of the pins you are working with.

Solder Sucker: This is a bulb with a narrow tip. You can use this to suck out excess solder from tight places. For instance, if you’ve accidentally soldered over a hole, just heat the hole from one side with the iron, and suck on the other side with the bulb. It’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

Solder Wick: This is a braided copper wire that absorbs heated solder like magic. Good for cleaning up messes.

Side Snips: For cutting off the excess leads, cutting things to size, etc.

Basic tools: You’ll probably want a needle-nose pliers or a pair of tweezers to hold and position hot things. Some little clamps can come in handy as well if you feel like you’re running out of hands.

Soldering The Decoder Chip

The first step is the hardest, and the VS1011 is why. This chip is responsible for decoding your MP3 files, converting digital signal to an analog waveform, and amplifying it for the headphone output. It does all of this in a package as small as the tip of your pinky finger.

Daisy Mp3 3 20061126

As great as this IC is, you’re going to have to solder it directly to the board, and it’s surface mounted… not to mention the tight spacing on the leads. You’ll want to take your time with this one, but it’s doable. Start by putting a very tiny solder bead on one of the corner pads. Then position the chip carefully and heat that corner pin to fasten it to the corner pad. Once it’s secure, solder down another corner and make sure everything is lined up perfectly.

When it’s secured and aligned correctly, solder down all the rest of the pins. Don’t worry about solder spanning between pins. We can clean that up later. Just focus on making sure that solder has flowed correctly and fused each pin to its pad.

You’ll probably end up with a big mess of excess solder. You can use the iron to melt the excess and, using surface tension, pull the excess solder around. Try and collect it into a big pool. Then you can lay a clean strip of solder wick over the lump, heat it with the iron, and the excess will flow into the wick. You may have to do this several times, but eventually there will be so little solder left on the pins that the surface tension will keep the solder from spanning multiple pins.

I’m not sure if there’s a better way to do this, but it worked okay for me. It just requires a little patience and a little trust that it will turn out okay. I made a quick movie so you can get an idea for how much of a mess you can make and still have things work out for you:

Once you have the decoder chip mastered, you’ll find the SD socket, the audio jack, and everything else to be pretty straightforward. Pay special attention to the tabs on the audio plug and SD socket. These serve to hold the components in place when you’re jamming stuff into them, so you want to focus on a good physical bond when you are soldering.

LED Orientation

The LEDs in the kits are really tiny. If there’s any polarity marking (flat side) on the casing, I can’t see it. Just don’t trim the leads at all before you have soldered them in. The side with the shorter lead should match up with the flat side in the diagram on the board.

Miscellany

The 10uF capacitor doesn’t fit particularly well between the 40 pin socket and the resistor network. You just have to lean the resistor network over a little to make room for the capacitor.

Pay attention to the order of assembly in the instructions. It’ll save you a lot of hassle, as it gets the hard-to-manage pieces done before other parts start getting in the way.

Daisy Mp3 1 20061126

FAT32 And Nothing Else

When you first turn the Daisy MP3 player on, both LEDs should light up. If you’ve got an SD card in with an MP3 on it and nothing is happening, it’s probably because the card isn’t formatted FAT32. I was testing with a smaller, 64MB SD card, and it was formatted FAT16 by default. I was unable to format it as FAT32 using the OS X disc utility, but if you reformat your card on a pc (with a USB SD card adapter), you’ll be able to read and write to it from either OS just fine.

To format your card with a FAT32 filesystem (assuming your card shows up as drive E:), type the following at the DOS command prompt:
format e: /FS:FAT32

Then copy an MP3 over and give it another shot. The red light should flicker and you should hear sound now.

Where To Go From Here

Here are just a few ideas for making the best use of your Daisy:

  • Make a slick looking case to show up your iPod.
  • Add audio output to a home-brew clock.
  • Use the addressable track mode to give your robot a voice (think R2D2).
  • Add an IR receiver to enable advanced remote whoopee-cusion technology.

Have some other good ideas? Please share ’em in the comments!

Get the Open source MAKE MP3 player (daisy) at the MAKE Store – Link.

32 thoughts on “MAKE open source MP3 player (daisy) – getting started guide

  1. Macaba says:

    With regards to soldering SOIC’s, you can get beautiful and easy results (like I have!) by doing the following:

    Use the finest guage solder you can buy. Mine is 22 swg/ 0.7mm diameter.

    Buy an iron thats at least slightly better than a cheap one. To illustrate what i mean: In the UK, a ‘cheap iron’ is about £5. A BETTER iron is about £14. And it works SO well. (Then professional irons are £150). It really is worth the extra.

    Don’t even think about putting solder on anymore than 1 pad BEFORE you put the chip down (you got this correct). If you do 1 pad, then you can put the chip down and heat it to solder and stop the chip moving around.

    Inbetween soldering each pin, clean the iron. Heat the joint and quickly apply a SMALL amount of solder.

    Some tips.

  2. tekvax says:

    Sir,

    Please do not take offence to my comments, but that has to be the most asinine way I have even observed to solder a SMD package to a PCB!

    Please go ask Santa for some new tools and sign up for a soldering skills course!

    Regards,
    Dan

  3. tekvax says:

    Sir,

    Please do not take offence to my comments, but that has to be the most asinine way I have even observed to solder a SMD package to a PCB!

    Please go ask Santa for some new tools and sign up for a soldering skills course!

    Regards,
    Dan

  4. tekvax says:

    Sir,

    Please do not take offence to my comments, but that has to be the most asinine way I have even observed to solder a SMD package to a PCB!

    Please go ask Santa for some new tools and sign up for a soldering skills course!

    Regards,
    Dan

  5. wayn3 says:

    As I understand it, the VS1011 does not support the use of ID3 tags; some external program would have to put an index on the disk for this.

    The reason I mention this is that I have an interest in adding a display.

    What would be nice is to get a Wiki going so that links to the data sheets could be posted and people’s project ideas/code could be uploaded.

  6. tekvax says:

    Sir,

    Please do not take offence to my comments, but that has to be the most asinine way I have even observed to solder a SMD package to a PCB!

    Please go ask Santa for some new tools and sign up for a soldering skills course!

    Regards,
    Dan

  7. tekvax says:

    Sorry all,

    For double posting my rants…

    I’m having browser problems… Darn computers ;>)

    Cheers,
    Dan

  8. jason_striegel says:

    Dan,

    No problem. I was beginning to think you had a wire or two crossed ;)

    Regarding soldering courses, I didn’t exactly invent this method. Spark Fun has a good howto on the subject:

    http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/present.php?p=SMD-HowTo-2

    It works surprisingly well, lets you work at smaller sizes than your tool affords, and it makes mistakes not so critical, so it’s a good hack for the rest of us…but that doesn’t mean I won’t be asking Santa for new toys all the same.

    Santa, if you’re listening…

  9. russosv says:

    Dan:

    Why be a jerk? “Asinine” is a pretty strong word.

    Jason was kind enough to share his experience, and as many of us here are hobbyists, “whatever works” to get the job done is often the best way for us. His MP3 player is obviously working properly, so why is his method invalid?

    It doesn’t sound like Jason is mass-producing boards for resale, so I think this is a helpful video for those of us who can’t afford expensive equipment.

    Instead of criticizing him, how about posting a video of the “proper” method that you use for SMD soldering?

    Jason: thanks for your effort.

    Steve

  10. raphael-teuthis says:

    Thanks Jason for posting this how to! Really excellent job! I use the same super crappy soldering iron to do all my assembly. I think it cost me $7 at radio shack. It’s all about using thin solder, like you said.

    Also, wayn3: have you hooked a serial lcd up to the ser out pin yet? It pipes out the long file name, which is not as good as the full id3 tag, but it can get things going. Let us know about any progress you have on getting tag information!

    thanks!
    raphael

  11. tekvax says:

    Jason,

    I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have been so mean… Everybody had to start somewhere, and I’m sure if I had pictures of some of my early work, I’d yell at me too…

    Keep the faith brother, and your next job will be even better than your last! I’m sure you can even teach the old farts like me something! ;>)

    BTW: the crow tastes better with gravy and potatoes!

    Cheers mate,
    Dan

  12. Bre says:

    Nice solder wicking hack! Thanks!

  13. afaust says:

    has anyone made one of these to work with a hard drive? (in particular one of the 1.8″ Toshibas, or equivalent. Like that used by iPod, iRiver, etc.) What would be involved in making that work?

  14. jrob says:

    http://www.natrium42.com/blog/?p=40
    good technique^

    note the rosin flux pen preventing bridges

  15. NGinuity says:

    Hi, I also wanted to tell you that if you get an excessive blob of solder on your iron, you can easily drag it across a wet sponge between uses. It’s recommended you do this anyway.

  16. Rob-McKaughan says:

    OK, it’s built. Cool!

    Now I want to hack the code. After I go fetch myself a compiler (any suggestions for something cheaper than the CCS?), how do I reprogram the PIC?

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