the Story

Once uppon a day, some "not too busy" guys decided to build a MP3 player by themselves. This dummy boys were student at the EPFL in switzerland.
Everything begun with the story of another guy (Adrian) who put a PC running Winbug 98 in the boot of his car with Winamp to play MP3. 'What's this shit!', I said (Dust). Of course it was effectively too big for such an application ! So we decide to built our own MP3 player.

The first idea was to create a player for the car, so the dimensions choosen matched with a car radio. Then other bigger dimension could be taken. A "portable" 2.5 inch hard disk will be used.

The design begun just after our final exams in October 2000. The first months were dedicated to the first studies. We finally decide to use the Micronas MP3 decoder chip MAS3507D with a 8-bits Pic microcontroller of Microchip.
As data storage device, we decided to use a hard drive (the 650min of music that you can put on a CD aren't enough !!). The challenge was to read this drive with a Pic.

At the beginning of 2001, I bought material to create PCB ! We were so able to build our first prototype.

In April, we finished two things : our studies at EPFL and the hard drive part. Since that date the project was nearly in idle mode through some monthes due to the lack of time (we begun with real jobs).

But since october 01 I restarted it alone (unfortunately) and I finished the final version on 19 june 02. The result is perfect (for me at least).

Finally, you must know that our mind was not to do this project to sell the result, but to let it free on the web. So you can now find the schematic on this web site in the technic section. There is no plan to publish the code at present, but I can send some routines to anyone who would to built there own player ... (It's so more amusing to do it by yourself.)

Enjoy, dust...