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MP3 Player Schematic

I decided to give a bit more details on my MP3 player today. Above is my original schematic that I designed back in January (I’ve really been lagging a bit on this project). The design remains basically the same today, with a few minor changes.


For instance, in the schematic I have the LCD backlight controlled through a transfer gate, but after looking at the PIC’s datasheet and measuring the current drawn by the backlight, I decided that I would be able to connect the LCD directly to the PIC. As an added bonus, I connected the LCD to one of the pulse width modulated pins on the PIC and now have fine control over the brightness of the backlight. This will allow me to fade the backlight on/off when the user hasn’t pressed any buttons in a certain time period (power saving feature, yay!).



On another front, the SD card still gives me problems, and I have sampled some 3.3V LM2936 voltage regulators from National Semiconductors¹. I’m hoping that when the regulators arrive I will have more success with the SD card; imprecise voltages can have a large effect on the SD card operation from what I have read online. Up until now I have been powering my SD card through a simple voltage divider.

Fireworks that we set off at my lake. My camera’s nightshot mode has a longer aperture time making these look really cool.

Well, it’s official; I am now an adult in the eyes of America (not that it really matters, I’ve been an adult in Canada for quite some time now).
To celebrate, a couple friends and myself went out to my lake with my parents. All in all, fun was had, although we got a bit wet when we decided to do a 5km hike through the rain on our way back to the city. But to be fair, we didn’t know it was going to rain when we started the hike.

Obligatory sunset photo

Read more for a couple more photos.
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Hello Everybody! I am the proud new owner of a MacBook Pro.

Why did I do it? What could possibly compel me to get a non-pc laptop? Well, with an intel mac, I can run Windows and OSX
on the same machine and thus run virtually any piece of software under the sun. Installing Windows was a breeze (easier than installing it on a PC in fact).

So far, I really like OSX. It’s just great; everything simply works as you would expect with no hidden surprises. On top of that, it is very nice looking with lots of strategically placed eye candy. Over the next little while I will be looking into various pieces of Mac software and I may or may not post my progress with that.

Anywho.. view the rest of this post to see some more photos.
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