So I bought an old Philips ghetto blaster from the 80s; it’s kind of basic - the only lights on it are a power led and a stereo led, but it’s pretty big with a central woofer and two slightly smaller left and right drivers plus the poxy little piezo tweeters you get in these things wired in parallel (can these be worth a damn?)…
So no cool VU meters or anything, but it has one thing I always loved on these - wide stereo. And unlike every other time I’ve seen it, this isn’t a switch - it’s one of a lovely bank of knobs (successfully de-crackled with a squirt of CRC and some compressed air), which lets you go smoothly from mono through stereo at the midpoint to wide! Nice one. I guess I should replace all the electrolytic caps to get the FM radio and amp sounding good again? There’s a bit of hum going on…
I ripped out the tape deck (I’ll probably have a go at partly replacing it so I can use the tape controls hacked into being momentary pushbuttons), and I’m thinking of filling the hole in the front with something like this:
But reading reviews of this device, I’m not sure it’s good enough; a lot of people seem to think it’s too crappy to use.
Anyone know of a similar touchscreen DAB device which includes Bluetooth and possibly MP3 playback via USB/microSD, which isn’t nasty? A dozen or more presets for stations would be desirable. An FM transmitter to piggyback other radios off would be cool too, but it’s certainly not on the list of must-haves.
I’m also having trouble finding what I’m after for powering this thing. I’d like to incorporate a 2p4s 18650 battery, to be charged via the original mains plug. Considering ditching the old linear power supply (which only seems to have a rectifier and no smoothing before the main PCB of the amp/radio) in favour of a switch-mode laptop power supply I happen to have, delivering 20V (isolated via the battery - would that prevent the switch-mode noise getting into the audio?)… But I can’t seem to find any charging circuits for 4s which accept over 18V. And BMS seems to be separate from charging… What a palaver.
Perhaps using the old power supply is the go? I think it’s about 14V from memory (the old D-cell battery compartment supplies 12V). So confused about the way forward here! After the mains transformer, charging circuit, BMS and battery, I guess I’ll need a couple of step-down regulators to provide the 12-14V or so and 5V to run any Arduino or something I want to stuff in this thing down the track to run some RGBAs or whatever…
Anyone able to point me in the right direction concerning any aspect of this?
There’s heaps of room, so much so that I’ll be using the old battery compartment to store the power cord.
But I don’t want to buy more cells for it when I’ve got heaps of them already - part of the point of this project is re-using e-waste. The cells I want to use are 80% of a dead Milwaukee battery (one pair of cells in it had 0.00V each, which I found somewhat remarkable).
Probably sound pretty ordinary without them.
Are you sure they are piezo???
You can pay a lot of money for some of these little up market tweeters. Nothing much “poxy” about them.
Cheers Bob
Yeah, I know proper piezo tweeters are a thing, but these are just those brass discs you’ll find inside a watch; I’ve only seen them in the nastiest of “two way” speakers, where you’re lucky to see even just a solitary cap for a crossover. These ones have nothing - wouldn’t the amplitude of the bass wavelengths cause distortion?
I’m not sure I’ve ever come across a decent piezo tweeter, or at least seen inside one… I’d expect a different form factor, or at least the brass disc to be only a part of an assembly with a tuned horn or something…
The app controlling a lot of different devices is no coincidence. Pretty much ALL (or as close as it doesn’t matter) dab radios nowadays are based on a hardware by a company called Frontier Smart Technologies (formerly Frontier Silicon).
Bigger/more expensive devices (think: Denon, Sony and so on) use only their DAB receiver and rest of the hardware/software comes from device manufacturer but the kind you’ve got is based almost entirely on a module/board from Frontier. PURE (in this case) provides speakers, LCD and maybe audio amplifier in terms of electronics (although I think there is a low power amp provided in the module). And of course: they design the body of the product. Frontier also provides all of the software and as far as I know OEM has very limited customization options (boot logo, enable/disable certain features, mainly based on device form factor, usb ports present and so on), they certainly don’t get any source code. This is great for OEM because they don’t have to bother with support/updates at all and quite nice for customers because they get quite polished product (in terms of software), app for controlling it, security updates. But because of that all of those devices look and control pretty much identically. There are some differences based on generation of the platform but even between them UI is very similar. Play with similar radios when you’ll have the chance and you’ll see what I mean. Your radio is probably based on “Magic” module because it seems to lack Spotify but it could possibly also be “Venice” with this functionality disabled.
Anyone been down this rabbit hole? Would be great if I could just order some guts to spec rather than try to find a suitable radio to butcher… Seems like quite a lottery.
What a rabbit hole indeed. Outside of Frontier Smart’s website I wasn’t able to find too much info on their boards. It is a bit of a shame it seems hacking apart radios is the way to find a particular one. I found one site advertising ‘developer kits’ but otherwise not much else on just the boards.
