Cobbled together CD players

Craft
Published

May 20, 2020

Project Date: January 2020

This idea started from McDonalds Happy Meals. Two of the “gifts” with the meals were the books:

My daughter liked these books, and I found out that there were two more in the series. So I purchased the following books from Books for Kids.

These two books came with CDs, but I didn’t have a CD player. 💡 So the idea was born to make a CD player out of parts I had lying around the garage. I found enough parts to make 2 CD players, so that is what I did. These parts were from other interests and things I used to do (as well as some fortunate and unfortunate events).

I used to remove factory installed stereo head units from cars (my own and family members), and install head units that had CD players and USB ports. I learnt 2 important lessons early on when installing head units.

Learnings from installing car stereos
action result learning
cut a bunch of wires together 💥 lots of fuses blown cut wires individually
soldering in the car 🤢 felt nauseous don't solder in confined spaces/use terminal block strips

I used to have my own desktop PC and was lucky enough to inherit PC’s from other people who no longer required them. I kept these going for as long as possible by upgrading components. Eventually, these all died, and now I am left with only a 10 year old laptop (which I am using to write this blog). One PC died when the motherboard caught on 🔥 (probably too much dust), and others just due to old age. So, I had more components lying around that I could make use of.

I have also had some mishaps with mobile phones. One particular fateful day, I had two mobile phones in my pocket when I was at the beach (specifically at Cathedral Cove on day 1 of a 5 day getaway). I had my back turned to the water, so I did not notice a big wave coming. This knocked me off my feet, and of course, sea water and mobile phones don’t go well together! 😢

These interests, benefits, and mishaps gave me the components that I needed for this project. CD players

For the first CD player, the list of components were:

The trick to be able to use a PC power supply unit outside of a PC (not connected to a motherboard) is to connect the green wire (power on) to one of the black wires (ground). I was then able to make use of the 12V cables to power the head unit (good info on how to convert a power supply unit can be found here).

For the second CD player, the list of components were:

I didn’t want to cut the wires from the android speaker (it requires 5V power via USB and has a 3.5mm audio plug), so I had to scavenge a PC USB socket and connect that to a 5V supply set of cables from the power supply unit. Then I needed to find a 3.5mm audo jack for the android speaker to plug into. I initially investigated the use of the audio jacks from the PCs, but they were all part of sound cards or motherboards and were not easy to remove and use. Then I remembered I had some dead mobile phones, and disassembling one revealed that the audio jack was on a small circuit board of it’s own (not part of the main phone circuit board). I was able to solder the audio output wires from the head unit to this audio jack circuit boad, but I still needed an extension for it. Fortunately, I also had an audio extension cable lying around which was perfect for this project.

🎉, 2 CD players! One in my daughters room for her to use, and one on my pallet stand up desk to raise my laptop on.



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