being the broke college kid i am and the diy audio fanatic as well, i felt it was time to try something basic for a cd player. this is a no frills project that cost me nothing (and will cost others next to nothing) to do and is quite upgradable depending on cost and knowledge. if i'm repeating what someone else has done, sorry.
i started this project after scrounging through my college's computer/electronics recycling center looking for some cases and power supply goodies (kinda came back empty handed with that stuff, but still managed a couple good finds. any suggestions what i should grab next time i'm there?) what i found was an appleCD 300. this was quite the common external scsi drive back in the day. realizing there wasnt much i could do with the stock drive, i decided to see what i had for stuff lying around.
i managed to come up with a spare dvdrom drive that i had around. the main purpose of switching the drives (the original was an standard size drive, so can be switched with any normal cdrom/dvdrom pc drive) was the fact that the apple did not have a play button on it. because i have no program knowledge thus far, i wanted to go with something that would work with no software. after ripping out the old drive, i realized the rca outs were wired slightly different than the stock pinout on pc drives. soldered a couple wires, problem solved. next step will be to hook up the digital out from the drive to an rca jack and see if it works. but, as of this moment, the drive works. no ff, rw, last track, or pause, but it plays. and its small size works too.
i know most people around here have done some amazingly complex diy, but i'm not quite as ready to dive into that stuff yet. however, for those like me, here's an easy toy to play with in the mean time.
lemme know what you think
i started this project after scrounging through my college's computer/electronics recycling center looking for some cases and power supply goodies (kinda came back empty handed with that stuff, but still managed a couple good finds. any suggestions what i should grab next time i'm there?) what i found was an appleCD 300. this was quite the common external scsi drive back in the day. realizing there wasnt much i could do with the stock drive, i decided to see what i had for stuff lying around.
i managed to come up with a spare dvdrom drive that i had around. the main purpose of switching the drives (the original was an standard size drive, so can be switched with any normal cdrom/dvdrom pc drive) was the fact that the apple did not have a play button on it. because i have no program knowledge thus far, i wanted to go with something that would work with no software. after ripping out the old drive, i realized the rca outs were wired slightly different than the stock pinout on pc drives. soldered a couple wires, problem solved. next step will be to hook up the digital out from the drive to an rca jack and see if it works. but, as of this moment, the drive works. no ff, rw, last track, or pause, but it plays. and its small size works too.
i know most people around here have done some amazingly complex diy, but i'm not quite as ready to dive into that stuff yet. however, for those like me, here's an easy toy to play with in the mean time.
lemme know what you think
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oh, and just got the digital out working. everything's goin well so far. lookin forward to switching the drive for something a bit more user-friendly (ie. more buttons)
Looks good. Is that a power supply in the box as well, so that you can runthe unit directly from the mains, or do you still need a 12/5V addaptor to get it running?
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