3 Simple Ways to
Share What You Make

With Instructables you can share what you make with the world — and tap into an ever-growing community of creative experts.

PhotosPhotos

Share one or more photos of a project, recipe, or whatever you've made, quickly and easily.

Step by StepStep-By-Step

Share your step-by-step photos with text instructions of what you made so others can do it too!

VideoVideo

Share your how-to video. You'll need your embed code from a video site such as YouTube.

Cheap and Easy MP3 Shield for Arduino

Cheap and Easy MP3 Shield for Arduino

This is a follow up to an earlier Instructable for attaching the guts of a cheap clip MP3 player to an Arduino.

http://www.instructables.com/id/MP3-Interface-for-Arduino-Cheap-and-Easy/

The previous Instuctable showed how to use the Arduino to control all of the functions of the MP3 player: volume increase and decrease, next and previous MP3 file, play or pause. The previous Instructable also showed how to disassemble these little clip players and salvage the cool parts within.


This Instructable makes the attaching the MP3 player to the Arduino more straight forward and a lot cleaner. In this installment, we will make a single sided Arduino shield. (You can use this same process for your other Arduino projects.) If you are into electronics and like prototyping, being able to fab your own PCB can be a great addition to the personal tool belt.

So why do this? Why attach an MP3 player to an Arduino? Think about responsive talking toys (how about a screaming/moaning version of Operation?), interactive dioramas, museum touch-and-explain displays...

PLEASE SEE THE LAST STEP FOR SOME FOLLOW-ON INFORMATION CONCERNING THE LC2093-B.
 
Remove these adsRemove these ads by Signing Up
 

Step 1Design the Board

Design the Board
There are a limited number of connections that we need to make between the MP3 player and the Arduino. These connections are:
1. 3.3V from the Arduino to power the MP3
2. Ground. So there is a common ground between the two devices.
3. Vol- on the MP3 attaches to pin 8 on the Arduino.
4. Vol+ on the MP3 attaches to pin 9 on the Arduino.
5. PLAY/PAUSE on the MP3 attaches to pin 10 on the Arduino.
6. Pins 6 and 7 of the Arduino are use to control a 74HC244 tristate driver to allow NEXT and PREV selection of MP3 files.

(Note, the comments on the previous Instructable suggested that the analog switches in that design be replaced with some more universally available part. I think the 74HC244 takes care of that: it is cheap, universally availble thru electronics distributors, handles both selections in one device and handles the 5V Arduino to 3.3V MP3 conversion.
See the previous Instructable for the explanation of how the design works...)

I use EagleCad. Because of the screwball spacing of the Arduino connector, I just start with the Arduino standard shield design and modify to suit my application. You can find a standard Eagle shield design at:

http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoProtoShield

Attached are my files.
« Previous StepDownload PDFView All StepsNext Step »
14 comments
Apr 27, 2012. 8:20 PMSG1Oniell says:
Question, would this be suitable for a custom lightsaber perhaps? If there were a way to shrink its size to be much thinner, but longer it would be perfect to fit into the hilt.
Apr 28, 2012. 9:47 AMSG1Oniell says:
I've never even used arduino before, but it was the lowest cost alternative to the $150+ soundboards and led drivers. I do have some experience programming in several languages and working with a few different micro controllers, so I'm fairly confident I should be able to make it work. These small boards, are they just comparable to the standard arduino platform, just smaller? Or are they an actual sound board? The goal is to end up with a cheap, open-source lightsaber driver for people like myself who can't afford some of these really nice, but really expensive boards.
Feb 9, 2012. 2:43 AMUgifer says:
Interesting analysis regarding the datasheet.

Does the VS1000 datasheet have information on the IIC interface? Our LC2093 might well retain the same functions, or at least the same data format....

If we knew how to make it respond then getting an Ardu' to try all 127 I2C addresses until it received a response would not be too difficult!

I continue to await my shipment from HongKong!

PS nice shield. I'm not really familiar with octal buffer chips. Any clues the theory of how you make this setup work?

Apr 18, 2012. 6:31 AMUgifer says:
I finally got my shipment of clip players through - they were dead cheap but have taken something like 4 months to arrive!

Sadly, although they look identical to yours, the ones I have do not have the same chip. They have a 48-pin blob of epoxy! Not too likely to find a datasheet for that....

None of the controls go to ground - you can trace the connections back to 6 pins of the "blob" and the controls work from combinations of these - I reckon your buffer chip approach should work fine but it will need a little tweaking.

Tantilisingly, there are RX and TX pins marked on the board that trace back to the blob, but I just can't get it to talk to me! I've tried various baud rates but I'm not even getting noise through. Ho Hum. It would have been nice.

Apr 18, 2012. 2:10 PMUgifer says:
That's really kind of you but I'm fine with the ones I have - I bought four and I'm only really messing about with them. I just thought it would be great if I could talk to them over serial because you could do anything that way with only 2 wires.
Feb 20, 2012. 6:58 PMkentso says:
Thanks for the update to the older project. I was going to post, asking about i2c updates, but this is great. Any chance you could offer etched boards for sale ?

I got my player from eBay last week, but I haven't gotten it to work yet. When I plug it into any of my Macs they say that it is drawing too much power from the USB port. Not a big deal. It uses a chip bonded directly to the PCB, ie. not a discrete IC btw, but the other side is identical to the above pictures.
Feb 29, 2012. 7:11 PMkentso says:
Thanks for the files. I have installed Eagle and will play around with it. It'll be a bit of a pain to source a single surface mount hc244 and the other components not to mention the pcb but I'll see what I can do.

Another avenue I'm pursuing atm. is to use my Ethernet shield to send a wake on lan packet to the Mac to wake it in the morning, and then have it set to play something in iTunes with a script. I have speakers hooked up to Airport Express devices throughout the house so it can route the music to the bedroom. Once I have results from either of the two methods I'll post them.

Feb 20, 2012. 9:47 AMCecilias says:
What is actually an MP3 Shield and what is Arduino? Is it something to download songs?

Pro

Get More Out of Instructables

Already have an Account?

close

All Steps Viewing
View all steps of an Instructable on the same page when you're a Pro Member.

Upgrade to Pro today!
8
Followers
3
Author:dresch