On 12/03/2011 13:11, Adrian C wrote:
On 12/03/2011 10:45, Adrian Brentnall wrote:

For anybody who's interested - the electronics part of things is this
Velleman kit

http://www.velleman.eu/distributor/p...iew/?id=380100

which provides an easy way to carry 8gb (for me) or up to 32gb of mp3
music built into a small speaker cabinet with a dryfit battery -
giving an operating time of hundreds of hours on one recharge.

Part of my Market kit - so needs to be fairly rugged g

Probably not as rugged (uses a hard drive), and the items for this
project have long since dried up, but I made one of these before the
Apple iPod came out. It still works today and the playback sound quality
is rather good...

http://www.pjrc.com/mp3/

Looks like the forerunner of the Vellerman kit....
Same principle though....

Not sure hdd would be such a good idea - the kit needs to stand up to
the 's*d it - I'm cold, it's raining, there's not customers and I'm
going home' syndrome - which tends to results in a rather less 'careful
& precise' attitude to packing the van at the end of a market... g

Same reason pro band stuff ends up in enormous flight-cases -
your average roadie feels the same at 3am after the gig!

Recently I've started collecting highend 80s ghettoblasters. I feel one
could do with an MP3 heart transplant with the above gubbins.

The velleman kit works very well.
It's possible to 'program' it - so, on switch-on, my module just sets up
the usual parameters, chooses a track at random, and starts playing
(which is what I wanted it to do)
The dryfit battery also lasts 'forever' between charges -
Mk1 of the kit used a little portable MP3 player, the same speakers and
battery and a dual-ic PA - but the MP3 was always needing recharging....

With the new kit, recharging is so infrequent that I'm going to add a
volt-meter to remind me to do it !



Another DIY project on the back burner, is a ghettoblaster made of wood,
decent speakers and a car stereo for the electronics, or more probably -
the processing and storage guts of a laptop.

nice!


There is a hip hop / martial arts film staring Forest Whitaker, "Ghost
Dog: The Way of the Samurai", that features one of those DIY efforts. It
looks kinda cool.


Haven't seen that
Adrian