open-pod
A featherweight, open-source MP3 player — my attempt at building a modern take on the iPod-classic era, from the click wheel to the music manager.
The project consists into:
- hardware — A Kicad schematic to print the board: STM32 as a core, VS1053 to decode the mp3, some RAM chips, and a LCD display.
- ClickWheel — an MPR121-based capacitive click wheel (see the project);
- open-pod — the player firmware itself (C), with input, display and audio handling;
- indexer — a tool that crawls trhough the music library to generate quick indexing for the player to disaply the menus (Artits, Albums, Tracks etc)
The project is paused in developement, I usually do theese things during the long winter evening, so expect some more advancements in november!
- C / C++
- Arduino & AVR-ish hardware
- I²C & input
- LCD
- Linux services
Challenges
- Fast refresh of the screen: I had to store each pixel on 2bits for it to fit in the chip memory, and the transfert was a bit hard to tackle.
- Managing and searching within a large library (Artists, Tracks) with a smaaaal memory
- The clikWheel (that's where I stopped actually)
- Dealing with this whole world of chips, controllers, battery consumption etc. I am not an hardware engeneer, and I have an ambicious project.