A local second hand store had a small plethora of car radios, and I was trying to think of something could do with one. Finally came up with an idea. I enjoy me some portable CD and cassette players, but headphones and speakers are frequently, and inevitably separated. I've been meaning to integrate some speakers in to a build. I think I have a nice looking build now.
I still don't have a way to hold the drive shut because it all screwed to the frame of the old mechanisms, but the old car CD drive fit wonderfully, with almost no modifications! There were two main components, the board and disk reader. The reading slot loaded in perfectly, and rested at the height of the slot.
When the board was turned a quarter of the way, it rested nicely on top, with the exception of the component by which I am holding it in the picture below.
Plan A was to take the part off the board, and solder an inch of wire to each of the 28 connections, that way I could fold it back and stack it. Once I studied it, I noticed it was mostly radio components, fired up the board, and it's been running fine without it. The grounding shield to the antenna and RCA jacks was put in too well to remove, so I helped it fit too.
as you can see, the module to the left is still uninstalled, however, the front panel was planning to permanently remove, I was forced to keep thanks to the micro-controller. This was an easy mod, 8 pins, 9 f you count extending a grounding lead. I discovered I needed this when I put in a test CD, and realized I had no eject button, nor is there a mechanical release like there is in CD drives with a tray. Right now I just have the panel laying there, I will be attaching it subtly to the back.
It is currently powered through an RCA jack for windbag reasons I have mentioned before, and will link to when I find where. I don't particularly feel like re-typing them. Look around posts on rebuilding monitors, prolly clogging the tubes somewhere.
I used a small speaker from an answering machine that met it's eventual demise on the 4th of July. I got a chance to salvage parts before things got too bad. The quality is not great, tinny, but sufficient. If I want more quality, I'll sit in the car. I'd link a picture of the burned device if I could find it. It's either a video, or picture, somewhere among 500gb of DSCN---'s.
I did a little testing today. Sat out in the car fussing with it, I needed to step it up to house current and bring it back to 12v as I had insufficient parts to just draw from the car.
I also had to do a little scissor work to get the power from a standard CD jack to an RCA jack. I have a feeling this is going to hit "There I fixed it" soon.
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