tibbon

I had this idea a while back, but actually seeing the Woody made me think harder about it. Yea, this is something that's probably unlikely without some MAJOR work, although it would be cool to get off the ground. Maybe in 20 years! I'm sure that if you had called Commodore in 1984 and asked them how possible they would think it that a Midibox/Sidstation/etc... was to be built they would laugh and say it's not possible. Maybe I'll get around to it be 2027, then it would be combining TWO vintage computing products. I did as much Googling as possible yesterday to try to find a microcontroller for the iPod, but finding "iPod hacks" that aren't just spraypainting your iPod is hard. Searching for iPod signal flow diagrams, or schematics was a loss and only yielded me finding people building external cables for their iPods. What people will count as a hack these days... The closest I was able to find was a Linux driver for the iPod display, which is from some Linux-On-iPod project. cool, but not it. I was thinking about a few of the problems. Finding SMDs of all the components (except the 6581 of course) wouldn't be too bad, with the exception of a few things like the capacitors. I'm thinking that without the hard drive, battery, and exisiting circuitboards there's a 'bit' of room in there for one or two larger caps, and for the 6581 in a socket. As for the heat issue, I'm wondering if the fact that the rear 75% of the iPod is metal could be used as a small heatsink? Scrap the battery idea. Just use the iPod connector on the bottom (or one of the other I/O sockets) to provide all power/midi/audio connections. You're right, this project (nor the 6581) was really built with an iPod battery in mind, and that additional real-estate would be valuable. I realize this is probably a 'never-going-to-happen' thing, but if someone wanted to work on this a bit, I'd be willing to ship them what's left of my iPod (or at least make measurements on the inside at first!) so that they would be able to get some stuff together. The largest problems that I can see is that SMD stuff is a bitch and a half for me. Not very DIY friendly. I know some people can do it with their eyes closed, but my hands aren't that steady (I some days wonder if I have parkinson's or something as my grandmother did...) Anyways, I still might pull out the Mouser phonebook later and see how many of the parts I can find equavalents of in SMD form. Does anyone know if the iPod's (4G) encoder would be at all suitable for controlling the MIDIbox, or would a microcontroller need to be built to interpet what it's doing?

I have a broken (dead hard drive) iPod 4G. I am thinking of building the Sidbox anyways, to replace my Sidstation (sold) and suppliment my Prophet 64 setup. I'm wondering... has anyone attempted, or put any thought into how small you could make the whole package if you re-layed out part of the PCB, etc...? Of course the iPod also has some nice little stuff like a screen built in, a headphone amp (or at least use the audio-out jack), a multipin connector (hook it up to the power supply, etc..), and the scroll-wheel/buttons, and even potentially for use- a battery. It seems that it would take some work, but if you could manage to fit in the whole thing in there and make it run... that would be pretty amazing. Any thoughts? I'm going to go take a look in my iPod again and try to figure out a few things. We would either have to cut a hole in it for a Midi in jack at least, or (better idea?) use the power/sync cable to carry Midi I/o and power, and make an adaptor/breakout cable for it.