I recently stumbled across and old toy record player made by Fisher Price in the 1970s. I'm sure many of you will recognise this iconic toy and some of the older Instructables visitors may well have had one. As with many 40-year old toys, it was in a bit of a sad state and a couple of the records had been lost. Technology has moved on since it was manufactured and making some new records for it seemed like a nice way to merge old technology and new.
3D printing a record might seem like the obvious choice these days, but I decided to go with CNC milling.
Why a mill you ask? Not a laser cutter or a 3D printer? Well we can't use a laser cutter as the record needs slots in the surface but these don't go all the way through. Laser cutters are great if you don't need any partial depth cuts, but we do. 3D printing the record would seem to be a sensible choice and would definitely do the job. However, we will end up creating plastic pins around 1mm in size that trigger the music box hidden in the record player's arm. I was worried about whether the extruded plastic technique used by most printers would give it the required strength. That, and I don't have a 3D printer.
Also the CNC mill means I'm not limited to plastic. I can just as easily create the records from wood (a hardwood should be strong enough) or even metal, but let's start with plastic.
If you want to 3D print a record then my code will have to be adapted but it's all open and should be easy enough to convert. If I get a 3D printer then I'll definitely adapt the gcode generation part so that it can create the appropriate files for a printer. I'll be entering this in the "Make it Real" challenge, so you never know... In fact, if I win a 3D printer, I promise I'll update it so it can print records too. Anyway, what could sum up "Make it Real" more than taking something intangible like music and turning it into something physical.
UPDATE: I've now finished a 3D printed version of this project. As all but one of the steps are different, I've created a separate Instructable for it here. So if you don't have a CNC mill (that's everyone apart from rdarlington) then you can now create your own discs.
Continuing the spirit of Instructables, if you create the music and share it, I'll make it real for you. Download the music editor (see step 3) and send me the fpr file it creates. I'll pick the best, mill them and a send out some discs. I'm not very musical, so sure that it won't be hard do do better than my attempt. I have to limit it to 5 just because each one will take me a couple of hours to do.
3D printing a record might seem like the obvious choice these days, but I decided to go with CNC milling.
Why a mill you ask? Not a laser cutter or a 3D printer? Well we can't use a laser cutter as the record needs slots in the surface but these don't go all the way through. Laser cutters are great if you don't need any partial depth cuts, but we do. 3D printing the record would seem to be a sensible choice and would definitely do the job. However, we will end up creating plastic pins around 1mm in size that trigger the music box hidden in the record player's arm. I was worried about whether the extruded plastic technique used by most printers would give it the required strength. That, and I don't have a 3D printer.
Also the CNC mill means I'm not limited to plastic. I can just as easily create the records from wood (a hardwood should be strong enough) or even metal, but let's start with plastic.
If you want to 3D print a record then my code will have to be adapted but it's all open and should be easy enough to convert. If I get a 3D printer then I'll definitely adapt the gcode generation part so that it can create the appropriate files for a printer. I'll be entering this in the "Make it Real" challenge, so you never know... In fact, if I win a 3D printer, I promise I'll update it so it can print records too. Anyway, what could sum up "Make it Real" more than taking something intangible like music and turning it into something physical.
UPDATE: I've now finished a 3D printed version of this project. As all but one of the steps are different, I've created a separate Instructable for it here. So if you don't have a CNC mill (that's everyone apart from rdarlington) then you can now create your own discs.
Continuing the spirit of Instructables, if you create the music and share it, I'll make it real for you. Download the music editor (see step 3) and send me the fpr file it creates. I'll pick the best, mill them and a send out some discs. I'm not very musical, so sure that it won't be hard do do better than my attempt. I have to limit it to 5 just because each one will take me a couple of hours to do.
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Signing UpStep 1: What you'll need
f you want to produce your own record you'll need a few things.
Firstly, you'll need a CNC controlled mill or router with a 1mm end mill. I understand that this is not exactly the sort of thing most people have lying around - but it should be! I bought a mill and converted for about £525 (€650 or $825) and it's been so useful for milling PCBs and creating random stuff like this.
If you're interested I've detailed my conversion in another Instructable here. Plenty of other people have documented their builds of this and similar mills too.
Secondly, you'll need a suitable sheet of plastic to mill. I used acrylic sheet in either 3mm (for single-sided record) or 5mm for a double-sided one. This easily available in A4 sheets that is enough to create 2 records. Another advantage of the mill is that we could make our records out of wood or even metal. Let's stick to acrylic for now though.
Firstly, you'll need a CNC controlled mill or router with a 1mm end mill. I understand that this is not exactly the sort of thing most people have lying around - but it should be! I bought a mill and converted for about £525 (€650 or $825) and it's been so useful for milling PCBs and creating random stuff like this.
If you're interested I've detailed my conversion in another Instructable here. Plenty of other people have documented their builds of this and similar mills too.
Secondly, you'll need a suitable sheet of plastic to mill. I used acrylic sheet in either 3mm (for single-sided record) or 5mm for a double-sided one. This easily available in A4 sheets that is enough to create 2 records. Another advantage of the mill is that we could make our records out of wood or even metal. Let's stick to acrylic for now though.
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Actually, considering the music is digitally encoded in pits engraved on a small disc you could probably say that this is a very early CD.
I can't add links in comments, but you'll find a link to a new Instructable on the first page - or copy and paste this.
http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-printing-records-for-a-Fisher-Price-toy-record-/
I've now updated this and there shouldn't be any issues but if anyone is using this please check before you mill! I tried my best and it worked for me but I'm fairly new to this.
CamBam is what I used to view and it helped a lot. I had some bugs where notes were packed so close that the second one started before the first finished and the "backwards" arcs my code created gave some large circles.
The code first works out the polar coordinates of the pins. The gcode files are just text so that wasn't too hard to generate from this. I would expect that the next step for 3D printing would be to start with a "blank disc" STL file and to add the appropriate pins by adding shapes to the drawing as required. I've no experience of creating STL files in code (yet) but will update this Instructable with my progress.
I've been checking out Instructables for a while If I'd known it was this much fun I'd have got round to posting something before. There are a few other things I hope to get written up soon.
For double sided discs this means that the engraved description is for the other side! This is obviously the same if you play the original discs on the "wrong" player too,
I've had "You are my Sunshine" by peakfrean that'll be heading his way soon.
MantisFang and FaceInTheBooty have created original compositions and asked for me email address to send them to me, but I've not received anything yet.
kelprecords would like to get something from one of the artists on his record label out on the latest and greatest audio format. (Who needs MP3s and iPods? This is the future.) He's working with the editing software now and I'll be very interested to see what he comes up with.
http://kelprecords.com/hilotrons/
This definitely shows up the limits of the player. You can see where it's trying to play some repeated notes quickly and they're not one of the "doubled-up" ones. The music box trips up and skips a little.
Have you got one of these record players? If so, drop me a message with your address and I'll mail you a copy.
And you know how particular Star Wars fans are - I'm afraid if I create a version with a few bum notes I'll have legions of them after me.
You should see if you could directly convert a MIDI file - they're basically digital sheet music.