Building your own MP3 player

[TraumaRN]

So my best friend is an engineering major and he's wondering if he could slap together a homemade MP3 player.

To keep this post simple he has a stack based processor on fpga with a com port, sound card and mini SD....is this going to cut it to build an MP3 player(besides needing some sort of storage) and if so any one have a guide or has done it in the past??

 

[bobsmith1492]

I've seen all-in-one MP3 decoder chips. I'm sure one of those would make it really easy.

http://www.pjrc.com/tech/mp3/sta013.html

http://www.st.com/stonline/prodpres/dedicate/mp3/mp3.htm

Interfacing his SD controller with one of those and maybe a D/A and amplifier should do the trick.

 

[dmens]

One of the classes I TA'ed a while back dealt with microcontrollers and many groups designed MP3 players... perhaps you can find some hints in their pages:

http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ee476/FinalProjects/

 

[pm]

I've seen some comments about the Minty MP3 -which is a homemade MP3 player in an altoids box.

http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000607027290/
http://web.media.mit.edu/~ladyada/make/minty/

Then there's the "Super Simple MP3 player":
http://www.walrus.com/%7Eraphael/html/mp3.html

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

I don't think it would be too hard to design one but with the price of mp3 players these days, why bother?

I think all you'd need would be an MCU, a codec chip, a D/A, and a bit of power circuitry. He might also need a chip to access an SD card or something if he can't do it directly from the MCU and maybe a small character LCD for good measure. Coding the system might be a bit of a pain in the ass though.