WM-F45 Upgrade (Sony Walkman)

How I was going to actually turn the buttons on the outside into digital inputs, took a bit of thinking. For awhile I had the idea of 3D printed inserts and a brace of sorts with places for buttons. I had also planned on making it one connected structure that would fit around all of the nooks and crannies.

Instead I salvaged the plastic inserts from the cassette guts, since these would be better than any inserts I could create. Also instead of one solid structure I went with a more modular approach, creating a small piece that could be printed in quadruplicate.

The tactile button sits against that back rail and the insert sits on the front and is lined up with the button.

And with the help of some cardboard and hot glue, all the buttons sit nicely up against the inserts and function as intended.

I'm going to give a quick rundown of what my ideas were before I got to this point.

First off my initial idea was to gut the walkman and install a Raspberry Pi with a nice audio DAC. I had bought some parts and it wasn't exactly coming together very smoothly. I was quickly running out of room and my button set up was juvenile to say the least.

(Yes that is a popsicle stick)

Hypothetically from there I would have used a teensy to emulate a keyboard, and I would have written a small media player on the RPi to display on this tiny composite screen.

Noticing all of the flaws I decided it would be best to go with an android phone, and I bought a few on the cheap off of ebay for around $15 each. To interface with the android phones I looked around and found the IOIO board, which is one of the coolest boards in my eyes.

For the senior project class, research was a required part of the curriculum and I annotated the IOIO documentation on Analog I/O and Digital I/O (Yati). The IOIO board would have allowed me to add analog input from the volume pot and I would have been able to add a status LED to shine through where there was one originally on the device. I was also planning to write an android program that issued media commands to the device through a IOIO connected app. These were features I'm willing to put off (for now).

To get things moving more quickly I switched to the Bluefruit EZ-key, which added some more flexibility and a smaller form factor (albeit some weird programming software).