If you still own a Fisher Price cassette player, it’s probably buried deep in some ‘80s nostalgia-filled corner of your closet. But where most of us see a beloved electronic fossil, Matt Gruskin saw a retro-styled Bluetooth speaker.
Turning his Fisher Price cassette player into a Bluetooth-enabled device took a clever combination of electronic and mechanical hacks, even a little custom 3D printing. Hackaday explains:
[Matt] selected an off the shelf Bluetooth module and another ready-to-go audio amplifier board. He built a custom board to convert the stereo output to mono and hold the rotary encoder he used for the volume control. An Arduino (what else?) reads the encoder and also provides 3.3V to some of the other electronics.
The really interesting part of the hack is the mechanics. [Matt] managed to modify the existing mechanical buttons to drive the electronics using wire and hot glue. He also added a hidden power switch that doesn’t change the device’s vintage look. Speaking of mechanics, there’s also a custom 3D printed PCB holder allowing for the new board to fit in the original holder. This allows [Matt] to keep the volume control in its original location
Projects like this never cease to make me happy. Thank you, Gruskin, for bringing a little slice of my childhood into the modern world.
[Hackaday]