Finally, after endless months of development Revision C of the new Microprocessor Board is running inside the machine to control the tape and the CD-Player. Let’s not talk about Revision B since it still had some faults. However, it has been a long way and took many fails and expenses to come this far. Some days ago, for instance, I grilled all, really all(!), integrated circuits, a coil and the OLED display. Not sure what exactly happened but I added a fuse to protect the MCUs and other integrated circuits.
Only minor changes must be conducted for the final board. I added option for a temperature sensor and a control for a ventilator. Just to try if it will be possible to reduce the temperature and protect expensive components inside the machine. Have I mentioned that I lost two CD controller boards due to overheating in the last year? In combination with the new rear-plane this should improve the durability.
I started with the documentation in the “Modifications / New Processor Panel” section if you want to dive more into details. The content will be filled up during the next weeks. If there is anything you are interested in, let me know and I will add the topic.
During the last days I made some huge steps at reverse engineering. The cd player is now recognising the end of a track exactly. A lot of bug fixing took place and the controller is now very stable and (hopefully) bug free. The source code should be a little bit beautified before it gets published. Right now I am extensively testing the device.
Of course when spending so much time and money to create a new controller for the CD-Player, I must add more features to it. Everything I missed and was available in high.end CD-Players. The following features got added:
- Create playlists up to 27 tracks
- Position of playlist shown when changing tracks
- Shuffle playback: also randomises the playback of a playlist
- Intro playback: plays every song for about 15 seconds
- FTS – Favourite Track Selection: Save up to 27 predefined tracks. Not necessary to enter a FTS number, the software creates a unique identification number. Just insert the CD and a stored playlist will be loaded. Contains 64KB Memory and stores playlists for more than 2000 CDs
- Remote Control (YES!) for all Tape & CD-Player functions
- Shows remaining time of track
OK, to be honest, there is one feature missing in the CD-Player: It is not possible to jump to and index or chapter.. simply because I do not have an Audio-CD that uses this feature. Only the very early CD-Players support Index/Chapter navigation. I haven’t found this feature on my later CD-Players.
For the final release I decided to use different connectors for two reasons. First, it is not possible to get compatible connectors to use the existing ones without any changes. And since I spend again hours of fixing broken cables I decided to replace all the cables to avoid any further issues. This will hopefully make the whole Sound Machine more stable.
In addition, I need to find some time to complete and upload the video for a more detailed explanation about the project.
