NES MP3 Player Version 1

So now after all that talk about prototype this and prototype that, here is how I finally managed to make a working NES MP3 Player. It still has no screen and requires an AAA battery but unlike before, where I removed the little springs the battery connects to, I left it in place and it was then I realised that by cutting out a small rectangle in the circuit board, I could make it fit. Anyways, onwards to the guide. I used the following tool:

15 Watt soldering iron
Solder and desoldering wick
Dremel with all the accessories
Needle file set

Then I purchased the following

30AWG wire
NES controller
Screenless MP3 player
Female mini USB-B 5 pin (just search on ebay like here)

So let's start with preparing the MP3 Player. I used this MP3 Player which I got from a local supermarket before they discontinued it but you can find it on ebay. It's a very, very basic model where there are only 3 buttons where it works depending on how long you press it for. So pressing and holding the right/left button can increase/decrease the volume while pressing it once can skip to next/previous track. It is also how the pause/off/on button also works. So all in all, very, very basic.


After dismantling the innards should look like this:

The Play/V+/V- bit at the bottom used to have a mini tract switch which I removed before taking this picture. Now you have to desolder the earphone jack and the USB part so you'll end up with this:


MP3 Player is prepared. Now you have to prepare the circuit board which you begin by scraping the small black part until you see the tiny bit of copper for the solder to stick to.

Now you have to get a pen and ruler to do some measuring to figure out the right size to cut in the board to fit the MP3 player. This is done with the dremel and a diamond cutting disc. In essence, it should look something like this:

Picture on right shows where I have cut the trace to make sure that nothing interferes. So now you have to prepare the NES controller case which involves more grinding.

Now you need to cut a whole to fit the mini USB. This is done by initially drilling a small hole and then getting a needle file set to start filing it until you see something that looks like this:


Now it's time to fit everything together. This is the part where you will have to do a lot of soldering and more soldering. This picture should give you a very rough idea of how it should turn out:

When you work on the USB part, you would've noticed that the Mini USB has 5 pins:

While the MP3 Player only has 4 points:

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Well, Googling reveals this site which shows that one of the 5 pins on the mini USB is not used at all so you can just ignore it and just match each point to the USB. So by this point, you should get the hot glue gun and glue everything down into the controller case. After all that hassle, this is what you should end up with.

So that's a rough guide for the first NES MP3 Player. Hope this provides some help.

The downsides

If the idea of grinding, soldering, cutting, and more grinding doesn't put you off building one, here are two things which probably will.

1. You get a NES controller. Chances are it's used by someone who actually used it since the 80's and so when you open it up, you'll be greeted with a nice surprise.

Be prepared to get cleaning when you get open your NES controller.

2. Chances are when you decide to get building, desoldering is something that you can't avoid and the next picture shows what happens when you rush a desoldering job.

2 of the 6 solder pads have lifted right off. That is another MP3 victim all because I decided to rush it. At the time of writing, I'm not sure how this could be fixed but I'm sure it could've been fixed but I don't know how. So there you go. Just SOME of the ways in how building a NES MP3 Player can go wrong.

The other victim

So I wonder to myself, "can it be possible to get an MP3 player that is rechargable but has no screen?" The answer was yes. In the form of an iPod shuffle clone which I found on ebay one day.

It was perfect. It was always in supply on ebay, it had no screen and the battery was rechargable (albeit via a strange cable which I have to connect from the USB to the earphone jack). Only one catch. Up to this point, I worked on MP3 players that had to do the whole "push play for 3 seconds to turn it on". This one had a mini switch which I realised meant having to drill a hole to fit a switch to make it work and essentially having something sticking out which I didn't think would look great. So off I went with the dismantling.


Remember how I said that the MP3 player recharges via a strange cable that goes from the USB to the earphone jack, well that was the reason why this earphone jack has 5 solder points. A nightmare. So I got my desoldering wick and got rid of the blobs of solder. Now should be the moment of truth. Will it come off? WILL IT? WILL IT? OH YES. IT CAME OFF... wait... AW CRAP. Imagine me swearing after noticing that a solder pad, which is what connects the leg to the circuit board has remained attached to the leg of the earphone jack. I was screwed. The MP3 player was screwed. Without that pad, the thing can't attach to the board and I was left with a junked MP3 iPod shuffle clone. It's a shame that this couldn't have worked out better and so that is why I made this post to not recommend using the iPod Shuffle clone.

NES MP3 Player Prototype 2

By this point, I should lecture you on the NES in the UK. I'll give you the short version. Back in the 80's, everyone was playing the Spectrum, Amstrad, C64, BBC Micro etc and in a situation that still persists to this day, Nintendo released the NES in Europe as an afterthought and by then, it was the Sega Master System that everyone got. Reason I thought I might tell this is because NES controllers are absolutely nowhere to be found in the city I live in and so when I have to get them from ebay, they are absolutely overpriced. Anyways, with that rant out of the way, now for the second NES MP3 Player prototype. It happened by chance that I walked into my local electrical store and saw something that looked like this:
"Blargh, it has a screen" I thought then I noticed something. It was rechargable via mini USB. It was a eureka moment when I realised that I don't have to use an AAA battery and I can transfer music to it via the mini USB which is pretty much available on every gadgets nowadays. It didn't have a lot of memory but it was only 1gb but I still bought it and got to work on it. After the whole tract switch problem I decided to see if I can use the original circuit board that came with the NES controller and got to work on cutting and cutting traces. After literally destroying my first attempt, I got hold of a second NES controller circuit board and using a small screwdriver, scraped off gently the black stuff on the board to get something that looks like this.

I also used the screwdriver to score the lines across the traces so that only when the button is pressed on the controller will it actually control the MP3 player. Some might call this a hack job but it works well and as some people say, if the cars running, you don't look under the bonnet. So now onto sorting the player. The version I had also had tract switches built into them. I just pulled them off. The picture below shows what the top part looked like before while the one at the bottom with the 4 solder points is after I removed the tract switch. There is a risk however because when I bought a second one to attempt this method again, the solder pad lifted up as well and pretty much rendered the whole player worthless. In truth, it would be safer if you just soldered onto the legs of the tract switch itself to save the hassle.

If you manage to get past that part, you just have to solder two wires diagonally on the solder point to the circuit board and so when you press it, it performs the function like play, pause, fast forward, next track etc. By this point, I ended up with something that looked like this:

Circuit board was in 2 parts because I was too heavy handed when I was cutting parts of it out. If anything, I found that the wire soldering was the most tedious part due to having to guess how long each wire needed to be and how short. Now I had to get the USB part working. I got lucky and the mini USB came off easily when I desoldered it off and I just used some wires to extend it to be placed where I needed it. Now I had to grind the controller case to fit it in.

Photos I forgot to take at the time. How I drilled a hole for the mini USB and how I drilled a hole for the screen to be shown which at the time I purely forgot because I was in such a frenzy that taking pictures was the last thing on my mind. I will get to it in a future update. So anyways, now should be the moment where everything should slot together.


Yellow wire was all I had and so it was a really memory test to remember which point goes to where. And so by this point, I realise that everything works perfectly. It recharges by USB perfectly and each button works as I reassigned it to. Below is the finished pictures with just one tiny problem.

The screen hole bit off a chunk of the Nintendo logo. I get a few comment where people have asked why it's not possible to move the screen to the middle. As you can see from the construction, the MP3 player PCB was too big and so moving it left or right made no difference. Really one of those situations where the right MP3 player can make all the difference. So that was my second NES MP3 Player prototype and the only one to date which actually has a screen because I'm looking for that right MP3 player to work with. A few months after making this, the store discontinued selling the MP3 player I used in this and so even trying to find the same one on ebay is impossible. I still have this about to remind me of the pain and tears in trying to get it to work and it gave me valuable lessons.

NES MP3 Player Prototype 1

One day, I stumbled upon this site:

http://ohanoncomp.googlepages.com/nespod

At long last, it was a NES MP3 Player tutorial... of sorts. It suggested the use of the circuit boards with holes in them and tiny tract switches to control the MP3 Player and at the time, I found an MP3 Player that has no screen. So it solved 2 of the 4 problems. With that, I bought a glue gun (this was an impulse buy but little did I know how vital it would be later on), circuit boards and tract switches and ended up with this:

Which further mutated into this:
Can you spot the many things so wrong with it? Yes. The USB is missing so I was stuck with the same songs I loaded onto it when I got the 256mb MP3 player. Not only that, the battery had to be soldered so everytime the battery died, I had to get my soldering iron to desolder and replace the battery, risking the thing blowing up in my face. On the brightside, this was my first NES MP3 Player and as I held it in my hands, I was smiling like a father with a newborn... albeit a newborn with defects.

The circuit board and tract switches was one idea that could've worked but when I tried it on mine, the thing kept shifting so that only the right D pad worked and the left D pad didn't. In the end, I ended up gutting it and recycling the parts. I still had 2 questions to answer which was, "how am I suppose to power it" and "how am I suppose to transfer music". Both answer as I found out would come easily when I found a second hand MP3 player.

Also, here are some more pictures which I took of the first prototype before I removed everything to be reused again.

Funny story. The wires in the last picture were from the NES controller cord wires because at the time, the cords were about to be thrown away and because I was running out of wire. Although the intention was good, the wires were still too thick to work with so I had to order some 30 AWG wire which is almost as thin as human hair compared to other wires I used.

The first victim

For some unknown reason, I thought it would be nice to take pictures ages ago to document it for some website. I guess that time is now. So anyways I decided the best way to get started was to buy a cheap MP3 player to try and see how the innards work and so I bought the cheapest MP3 Player that I could find in my local store.

Then proceeded in smashing it and taking it apart.

So here I am. Left with a broken MP3 player and a general sense of "well that was a waste of money" (this is something that will keep happening). If I learnt anything, it's that the right donor MP3 player can make all the difference. Anyways, at the time, it raised several questions.

1. How do I power the MP3 player?
2. How can I transfer music to it via USB without it sticking it out of the controller?
3. How do I cut the hole for the screen?
4. How can I make the NES buttons work as the MP3 control?

It was at that point, I abandoned the project for a few months and just generally thought, "it's not possible at all" which got blown away when I found a small website link...

Mandatory first post

So after much pressure, I thought I'd better knuckle down and put my thoughts into text on a rough guide on making a NES MP3 Player. I was always a curious person who wonders how stuff works so even as a kid, I can remember taking apart alarm clocks and ending up being late for several days. It wasn't until probably 8 years ago that I got my first soldering iron and that was how I started getting into messing about with anything electrical. Then all of a sudden, 2 years ago, I see this picture.

No surprise then that it wasn't just a case of "wanting it", I NEEDED IT. And thus, began a long journey with a lot of broken MP3 players, listening to the same music while building it and the eventual results. It was also difficult because there wasn't really any actual tutorials for building one and at that time, it was literally a case of "learn as you go". I hope this blog helps some people but chances are, it'll piss off more experienced people. In the end, I hope this inspires people to make their own and have as much fun in making it as I did.