Anyone else converted an old radio to 3.5mm aux in or bluetooth? I think I might have posted this one way back in the day when I first built it. I recently gave it a minor revamp to tidy it up inside and took some fresh pics.
So it's a late 1950s Dansette 111. If you watch The Repair Shop on BBC2 you'll see one in the shots where they pan around. This one was my grandfather's and I inherited it when he passed away in 2007. It wasn't working. I'm fairly competent with old electronics, amps etc and this looked incomplete inside, so I decided it wasn't salvageable but that it would make a good candidate as an iPod conversion. I first converted this one about 10 years ago. I'd already converted an empty Roberts radio missing its insides, so this one was quite straightforward apart from carefully extracting the insides. I was hoping to be able to re-use the dials for volume and to be able to turn the tuner round, but they were very brittle and in the end I bonded them in place, just for show.
Back in the day, I'd have made an amplifier for this from scratch. Either with a chip like a TDA2822 or a small bipolar amplifier soldered up on stripboard. These days you can get pre-made modules on eBay for pennies, so I decided it wasn't worth the bother making anything from scratch. It's a 3.5W amplifier and a single 4" Pioneer driver which originally did duty in the door of my Anglia in the early 00s. 4 rechargeable AAs for power. Something that really annoyed me about the amplifier module was that it just had 5 short wires. That meant it always pulled on the wires when I opened it to change the batteries. Eventually (a couple of weeks ago) one fatigued and I decided to do something about it. I cut the wires short and tidied everything up by wiring in a bit of stripboard and some screwdown terminals. The amplifier module is well bonded to the stripboard, but it's just tacked to the radio door with small blobs of epoxy in the corners. That way I can take it off later without destroying the door.
At the moment I don't have any immediate plans to change it. I have got a little USB Bluetooth audio receiver like the one below which I've been considering hacking so it can run on Bluetooth instead of on the wire, but I think there's a bit of setting up to do. At the moment it's easy to just hook it up to something and it works. I don't want to turn it into something which needs nursing to make it work - that would be annoying!
So it's a late 1950s Dansette 111. If you watch The Repair Shop on BBC2 you'll see one in the shots where they pan around. This one was my grandfather's and I inherited it when he passed away in 2007. It wasn't working. I'm fairly competent with old electronics, amps etc and this looked incomplete inside, so I decided it wasn't salvageable but that it would make a good candidate as an iPod conversion. I first converted this one about 10 years ago. I'd already converted an empty Roberts radio missing its insides, so this one was quite straightforward apart from carefully extracting the insides. I was hoping to be able to re-use the dials for volume and to be able to turn the tuner round, but they were very brittle and in the end I bonded them in place, just for show.
Back in the day, I'd have made an amplifier for this from scratch. Either with a chip like a TDA2822 or a small bipolar amplifier soldered up on stripboard. These days you can get pre-made modules on eBay for pennies, so I decided it wasn't worth the bother making anything from scratch. It's a 3.5W amplifier and a single 4" Pioneer driver which originally did duty in the door of my Anglia in the early 00s. 4 rechargeable AAs for power. Something that really annoyed me about the amplifier module was that it just had 5 short wires. That meant it always pulled on the wires when I opened it to change the batteries. Eventually (a couple of weeks ago) one fatigued and I decided to do something about it. I cut the wires short and tidied everything up by wiring in a bit of stripboard and some screwdown terminals. The amplifier module is well bonded to the stripboard, but it's just tacked to the radio door with small blobs of epoxy in the corners. That way I can take it off later without destroying the door.
At the moment I don't have any immediate plans to change it. I have got a little USB Bluetooth audio receiver like the one below which I've been considering hacking so it can run on Bluetooth instead of on the wire, but I think there's a bit of setting up to do. At the moment it's easy to just hook it up to something and it works. I don't want to turn it into something which needs nursing to make it work - that would be annoying!