Tech project of the day

"jminer" (jminer) 05/15/2020 at 11:45 • Filed to: None

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So youtube’s sentient algorithms a couple months ago decided I would like watching !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! videos, and they were right! So that sent me down a rabbit hole of hunting ebay listings, fb marketplace and CL for and iPod to take and shove ludicrous amounts of flash storage into.

I landed on an iPod mini circa 2005 in the most glorious shade of ‘pink as hell’. It’s ugly, but in a relatively endearing way - and what was I going to do, spend another $15 for one in a better color? No way!

It came from FB marketplace from a dude in Ohio who would ship it (apparently FB is paying for shipping during some kind of promo at the moment) and it only cost me $21 . Best part is it’s fully functional as is with the 4gb hard drive in it.

The last part to complete this showed up yesterday, I bought a full sized SD card for the combo reason that the CF to SD was a couple bucks cheaper than CF to MicroSD and that a 128GB SD card was a couple bucks cheaper than a 128GB MicroSD as well as the adapter + card was about $25 cheaper than a 128GB CF card.

Tools required - tiny screwdriver, metal spudger, plastic probe and heatgun.

The heatgun is not essential, just softens the glue on a couple parts making taking it apart much easier. Also I love this Ryobi cordless heat gun, it’s amazing for quick jobs like this and I use it all the time with my 3d printer to clean up prints too.

Let’s crack her open!

Now onto the glory shot of an exposed iPod mini

Oh the humanity of that poor exposed and helpless device about to be torn asunder by a heartless nerd!

A bit of tape removal later and the Compact Flash sized spinning hard drive separates. This is definitely a marvel of early 00's engineering to create a mechanical hard drive in the footprint of a Compact Flash memory card.

Well time to pop in the CF to SD adapter and connect it to itunes for formatting.

The first time I restored it the iPod only showed 4GB storage so I removed the SD card, formatted it in windows again to full capacity and reinserted it and on the second attempt it showed all the storage in iTunes!

Throw the 10 gig of music I have been able to import back into iTunes, Sync and Viola!

The pic ended up sideways, but fuck it. Now you see a formerly 4GB iPod mini with 10 GB of music on it and 106GB available - success!

And she’s all back together and plays music. Now I’m going to spend the rest of my day pretending to work while actually importing music into iTunes and organizing it!

All in all this was ridiculously easy, took maybe 10 minutes to get apart and back together and functional, if you have a few electronics tools and have taken apart something small and electronic you can handle this.

Cost Summary:

iPod Mini 2nd gen - $21 on FB marketplace

CF to SD adapter - $15.58 Amazon

128GB PNY SD Card - $19.20 Amazon

Total - $55.78

Tools Summary:

!!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!  

!!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! (not essential)

Thanks for coming along for the ride Oppo!

Captain of the Enterprise > jminer 05/15/2020 at 11:49

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I may need to do this at some point. My dad has a 4th gen nano that he is still using and won’t upgrade or put music in his phone. Mind you he’s running a Galaxy S5 still and it’s out of memory so that wouldn’t be possible anyway. He can’t put all his songs on the nano so he has my stepmom switch what’s on it sometimes. He won’t learn new things. So at some point maybe I’ll have to put a battery in it or something. 

jminer > Captain of the Enterprise 05/15/2020 at 11:51

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We have a Nano still on our alarm clock, but you can’t upgrade the flash based iPods so it’s just the hard drive based ones you can do this too . The original Mini (the one I modded) is still pretty small though and takes the upgrade really well.

I think I’m going to experiment with streaming less music on my phone and being a bit more thoughtful about it, we’ll see how that goes.

CalzoneGolem > jminer 05/15/2020 at 11:52

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I prefer the 5th gen Classic iPod personally, but that’s cute AF.

The 5th gen classic has the best sound imo. I even have a 3rd gen classic modified in similar way to us SD cards.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > jminer 05/15/2020 at 11:53

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I still have a Sandisk Sansa Clip+ that still works but is really rough...it has a built-in MicroSD card slot and I am running Rockbox firmware on it, so it’s a pretty awesome little thing. I should really replace it with a newer Sansa C lip someday, but I don’t want to bother until this one dies, haha!

TheRealBicycleBuck > jminer 05/15/2020 at 11:56

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Neat!

There used to be a way to get iTunes to update all of your music files to a higher-resolution codec. With all that extra space, you might want to look into it.   

jminer > CalzoneGolem 05/15/2020 at 11:56

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i have a 6th gen classic that I love! In fact I love it too much to tear it apart to mod like this, so I bought a different iPod for this project .  I would have bought a 4th or 5th gen classic but they’re a lot more expensive than this unit.

My wife bought it for me for christmas back in 2007(I think) , when I was driving 1,000 miles a week for work and it was amazing! Loaded it up with music and podcasts which let me cancel my mediocre XM subscription and enjoy more content!

jminer > TheRealBicycleBuck 05/15/2020 at 11:58

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Thanks! I think the ipod will play max 320k files which is what most of mine are.  I turned off the setting in iTunes that would normally downscale them so I think I’m good there.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > jminer 05/15/2020 at 12:00

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I am at a loss to find adequate words to express how impressed I am by this. A triumph of home hackery. My hat is off to you.

jminer > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 05/15/2020 at 12:00

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That’s awesome! I was reading about the modded firmware for the iPod too, for now I’ll just rock it stock (minus the expanded storage).

jminer > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/15/2020 at 12:02

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Thanks! To be fair I can’t take any credit for the research, just finally got motivated/bored enough to finally gather the parts and do it.

GLiddy > jminer 05/15/2020 at 12:07

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Neat.  I still I have my old iPod mini around here somewhere but I don’t think it powers on anymore.  I think I got it free for opening a bank account or something.  Maybe I’ll see if I can make it work and do something like this with it.

jminer > GLiddy 05/15/2020 at 12:10

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If it doesn’t power on, it probably needs a battery. They’re pretty cheap though and really easy to replace once you have it open (which is pretty easy too).

This is a pretty doable project overall, I’d say order some parts and go for it!

jminer > GLiddy 05/15/2020 at 12:16

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Additional clarification, this hack supposedly only works on the 2nd gen iPod mini and not the 1st.  So if the year on the back of yours says 2004 and not 2005 then this might not work.

Boxer_4 > jminer 05/15/2020 at 12:18

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Nice! This is on my list of projects I want to get around do.

My first iPod was a 4gb 1st gen Mini in silver. I still have it, but I’m not willing to t ear it apart!

TheRealBicycleBuck > jminer 05/15/2020 at 12:19

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I found it! Subscribe to iTunes Match for a month. It will create a cloud account and “upload” all of your music. In reality, it will create links to high-res versions it already has loaded into the cloud. Then add a new device and download all of the music to the new device from the cloud. All of the new music will be in whatever resolution you choose, no matter what the original source files were.

jminer > Boxer_4 05/15/2020 at 12:22

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I have a 6th gen classic that’s in the same boat. I love it too much to tear it apart like this, so I bought an old iPod from a stranger on the internet!

jminer > TheRealBicycleBuck 05/15/2020 at 12:23

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That sounds pretty sweet! Thanks for the info.

CaptDale - is secretly British > jminer 05/15/2020 at 12:24

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I have a first gen Zune that I have been meaning to throw a usable OS on to make it a generic mp3 player since Microsoft doesn’t support it anymore. Maybe I will do that today

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > jminer 05/15/2020 at 12:26

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Yup....it’s an awesome little thing! I’ve had it for years....use it to play music in my car through the Aux. jack.

Mine’s a measly 2GB model, but I have a 4GB MicroSD card in it and it will support a 32GB MicroSD card, so I can take plenty of music with me :P

The battery is pretty shot in it and the screens sometimes cuts out until you put pressure on the bottom edge of it, but otherwise it still works perfectly. The battery used to last like...15 hours when it was new. Not amazing for some players nowadays, but considering it’s TINY (which I love about it) and the battery is minuscule, that’s pretty nice!

You’re mention of hacking the iPod has me wondering how long the battery in mine lasts now...I know the battery indicator is a bit wonky while its own. I’ve got it hooked up on some computer speakers in the rec room right now playing it on battery until it shuts off to measure how long it lasts :)

jminer > CaptDale - is secretly British 05/15/2020 at 12:28

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I had a couple Zune devices and genuinely liked them. A custom firmware should definitely make that usable today . I had to toss my last zune as the battery swelled in it.

MKULTRA1982(ConCrustyBrick) > CaptDale - is secretly British 05/15/2020 at 12:36

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Only on oppo can you find two different people who unironically enjoy their Zunes. Not that I’ve ever used one to be able to have an opinion , I just know they’re mocked a lot

bob and john > CaptDale - is secretly British 05/15/2020 at 12:38

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man I miss my zunes. 

ttyymmnn > jminer 05/15/2020 at 12:44

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Will it fold?

TheTurbochargedSquirrel > jminer 05/15/2020 at 12:49

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Another cheat for identifying 1st vs 2nd gen is that the 2nd gen has icons on the click wheel that match the case color while the 1st gen uses the standard gray symbols.

jminer > ttyymmnn 05/15/2020 at 13:00

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I’m afraid not - but I did it on the desk one of my folding machines sits under if that counts

jminer > TheTurbochargedSquirrel 05/15/2020 at 13:01

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Yep - I did that while browsing for the right device. Most don’t take pictures in high enough quality to read the date on the back.

CalzoneGolem > jminer 05/15/2020 at 13:06

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The 6th gen and up are a bitch to tear apart so don’t bother unless you absolutely have to .

I love your little pink iPod. We’ve got a mini floating around here that I now want to mod despite the fact that I have a perfectly serviceable 5th gen that has more than enough storage for my entire library.

CalzoneGolem > jminer 05/15/2020 at 13:12

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My DD

Just some cosmetic mods swapping tue white bits on and a new battery. I scored one with a good original drive so no need to mess with it yet.

jminer > CalzoneGolem 05/15/2020 at 13:15

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I like that - it looks awesome!

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > jminer 05/15/2020 at 13:29

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So that little microdrive has the same connection as a CF card?

I’d be tempted to try something like that myself, but Spotify and my cell phone get the job done.

CaptDale - is secretly British > jminer 05/15/2020 at 14:08

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Actually found a video on how to force the update and have it running on Zune software.

CaptDale - is secretly British > MKULTRA1982(ConCrustyBrick) 05/15/2020 at 14:09

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Yeah it was just too late. Came out 6 years after the iPod, but I liked the features: built in radio receiver , social network, and some other neat functions. Just took them too long to develop it

CaptDale - is secretly British > bob and john 05/15/2020 at 14:09

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Got mine working!

jminer > CaptDale - is secretly British 05/15/2020 at 14:35

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I just saw your post - awesome!

jminer > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 05/15/2020 at 14:37

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Yep, same connector and physical size too.

I use mostly streaming services too but it seemed like a fun project and using it today is so far ticking all the right nostalgia boxes for me.