1970's TV Project

Jimmydunes had a Meizu miniplayer that was no longer functional and he asked if I wanted it for parts or whatnot. After it had been sitting in storage for about a year he tried to fire it up only to discover the unit would not take a charge. Most likely a battery issue.

After a little research showed that getting a replacement battery seemed to be at the very least a shipping and handling hassle and at the very most an expensive shipping and handling hassle he decided he wasn't going to get it replaced. Besides, as nice as the Meizu is as an all-around media player jimmydunes has plenty of other ways to watch/listen to/read the various media in his collection. Unless a free Li-ion battery in that particular form factor just poofed into existence, fixing it really doesn't solve any problems.

I agreed to take the player off his hands because I didn't have any projects going on since I had finished the chessboard. I thought it would be fun to turn the player into a somewhat-scale model of a late 1970's TV. You know the kind – big, bulky, made of wood, unreliable, usually had a smaller, functional TV perched on top of it after it died...

A major plus is that I could probably do this project without spending any cash. See, it's kind of hard to justify going through the process of filling out the paperwork to request funding from Mrs. Snowurchin for this type of job because I can never figure out what to put in the “But, for the love of God, why?” blank on the form... :)

First, I needed to check that the battery was the only problem. After removing it I measured 0.00V across the terminals - somewhat less than the 3 to 5 volts I was expecting. Hmm. I soldered some temporary wires to where the battery was formerly connected and fired up my 5-volt power supply.

It worked. Sweet. But there is no audio, because the speaker is an integral part of the case, and the back of the case needs to be removed to route the power (and several other) wires later. Now what? Well, I toyed with the idea of using the speaker from a partially dismantled Furby I had laying around (shut up) but I didn't have an appropriate way of driving it. Since I didn't want to turn this potentially fun woodworking project into a PITA electronics chore, I decided to just make use of the output jack instead... well, the connectors, anyway.

Using the jack itself would force me to make the TV much wider than I wanted to so I routed wires directly from the internal tabs instead. A short MP3 test with some temporarily soldered wires and some useless (to apparently-malshaped-earhole-me, anyway) iPod earbuds showed that it should work just fine.

I likewise bypassed the on/off switch with some wire and an old calculator key switch – no problems there. All the temporary test wires are intended to be removed to allow me to fit and re-fit the player into the wooden TV case as the project progresses without stressing the solder joints and what have you.

But all of this doesn't mean too much if the battery problem isn't solved. It turns out I had a cheap battery-powered screwdriver I could scavenge for the Ni-Cd pack inside. I charged it up a bit and tested it out, a little dubious that it would work. It did. Nice.

Fair to say at this point I have violated the warranty on the media player.

(To be continued...)