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ARCHIVED FORUM -- April 2007 to March 2012
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This is the first Archived Forum which was active between 17th April 2007 and 1st March February 2012

 

Latest post 08-16-2007 11:08 PM by Ignace. 3 replies.
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  • 08-16-2007 6:01 AM

    • Bulgarien
    • Top 500 Contributor
    • Joined on 04-17-2007
    • Denmark, Vest Sjaeland
    • Posts 201
    • Bronze Member

    GREAT From beocenter 4600 to a modern MAC powerbook

    taken from here http://www.macmod.com/content/view/771/221/

     You tube video here

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcymDMlyv-A&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ehackszine%2Ecom%2Fblog%2Farchive%2F2007%2F08%2Fmacmod%5Fchallenge%5F2007%2Ehtml%3FCMP%3DOTC%2D7G2N43923558

    Bang & Olufsen Mp3 Mac Mod
    Written by Scott Mitchell   
     
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    image001

    This is my finished MP3 Music Player.  It’s based on a Wallstreet PowerBook and a Bang & Olufsen Beocenter 4600.  This has been a long process, I had planned to get it finished for last year's Great Mac Mod Challenge, so it’s a year overdue.

    The Story

    Two years ago I brought a non-working Bang & Olufsen Beocenter 4600 on eBay.  With blind optimism and no electrical training whatsoever, I thought I'd have it going in no time (and I did, I replaced the fuses), but then something inside blew up and I was left with a very large, very heavy, silver thing.

    image002

    A few weeks latter I bought another B&O stereo on eBay (yes, I was obsessed) and this time the stereo worked.  Because the two cases were similar, I decided that with a little bit of help the Beocenter 4600 could become a matching Mp3 player.  The ‘little bit of help’ turned into many months work, a crash course in Cocoa programming and an office that looks like this:

    image003

    I’m really glad this is over; I need my life back!  I didn’t really plan ahead with this mod, but the basic idea was this: cut the B&O case down to about half it’s original size, install the PowerBook inside with the screen facing up, connect the B&O’s original controls to the PowerBook and write a software program that would control iTunes and present a simple GUI.

    The original B&O case was far too big (you could bury someone in it), so I cut it down. The Beocenter 4600 was built in an era when everything was designed to come apart nicely, it was mostly Bakelite, aluminum and about 100 screws.

    image004

    I cut the base in half, modded the pressed metal back, re-mounted the end panels and shortened the front panel to match.  The final dimensions for the player are 36cm wide, 27cm deep and 10cm high.  I also went the hack on the PowerBook.

    image005

    The PowerBook’s logicboard sits at the base of the case, angled up a bit at the front to fit the aluminum profile.  The HD is mounted above the logicboard on the right.  The CD player is on the left.  I cut away most of the PowerBooks case because I needed the space.  A slot loading CD player is mounted behind the groove on the B&O faceplate.  Here I am adjusting the CD slot.

    image006

    I reused a portion of the B&O cooling fins and positioned them above the PowerBook’s rear ports; the back of the case comes together like this:

    image007

    I decided to ues the Wallstreet PowerBook for the mod because they’re/I’m cheap and they will run OSX (but only up to 10.2) [editor's note: XPostFacto can be used to break the 10.2 limitation].  The PowerBook I bought was listed as faulty (can you see a pattern developing?). It turned out there was a large quantity of sticky black stuff inside, possibly Cola? After scrubbing it down with an electric toothbrush, drying it out and installing a new screen, I had a fully functioning 8-year-old laptop.

    I need lots of storage space for my music so I decided to connect a desktop drive to the PowerBook. This was not as easy as I had anticipated and I ended up making my own IDE adapter.  I bought a laptop-to-desktop hard drive connector (the sort designed for connecting laptop drives to desktop computers) and joined it to the PowerBook’s internal connector.  I then soldered a 3 ½” female socket to the adapters header pins. It ended up like this:

    image008

    Desktop hard drives require a 12V power source and unfortunately I couldn’t find a 12V supply inside the PowerBook.  Although it was possible to run the HD off a separate power supply, I didn't want to use two adapters.  I considered ditching the PowerBook adapter altogether and going with a standard ATX style supply.  However, to get the PowerBooks required +24V from the average ATX box, you need to pull a few tricks.  Instead of using the standard black wires for the ground, you use the -12V wire (in my case it was blue).  All the other voltages are then calculated from this ground.  So, +24v can be obtained from what is normally the +12v line (and the +12V for the HD is located at the old ground wires). 

    I tried this out and for some reason it wasn't very reliable.  I had to try two power supplies before I could get this to boot into OSX.  The odd thing here is that the power supply that wouldn't boot to OSX had no trouble booting into OS 9.2 - go figure? (I thought it might have something to do with increased load; to test this theory I decided to stress the supply that did work by launching all the apps in my dock at once.  It didn't prove anything, but I must be over tired because the sight of all those icons jumping up and down together put me in giggle fits :).

    In the end I decided to use the PowerBooks power adapter and a voltage regulator.  The +12v supply was pretty unstable until I added one of the old power capacitors from the B&O’s original circuitry, since then everything has run smoothly. The power cap. is the grey thing at the back left of the case, the voltage regulator is screwed to the cooling fins (they ought to do the job!)

    image009

    In the above pic you can also see the modifications I’ve made to the sliding controls; the left slider gives ‘play’, ‘stop’, ‘fast forward’, etc. controls, the right slider is used to navigate the MP3 player’s menu system.  Connecting to the existing B&O controls was a lot of work.  I used an old plotters linear encoder and an ADB mouse to register movement of the right hand side slider.  This circuit plugs into the PowerBook’s internal ADB socket.

    image010

    I had to make my own buttons for the slider because I couldn’t find any small enough.  I filed them out of aluminum flat to match the front panel.

    image011

    For the left slider I positioned 6 read switches spaced evenly along the length of the controller and mounted a magnet on the rear of the slider.  As the slider moves back and forth, the read switches are activated.  These switches, along with the buttons on the front of the player, are connected to various keys through the internal keyboard connector.  The "OFF" button is an exception here.  This button puts the PowerBook to sleep.  It does this by using the 'sleep when closed' function of the PowerBook.  It’s wired across the reed switch that senses when the PowerBook’s lid has been closed.  The advantage of this system is that it overrides whatever else is happening and puts the machine straight to sleep. Wiring up the keyboard connector was a bit of a nightmare.

    image012

    My fingers are just too big.  I had the same problem when I was installing the CD player.  I was hoping I could run the CD as a Slave of the hard drive but it turns out the Wallstreet only supports one drive on the main bus.  The only alternative was to use one of the PowerBook’s expansion bay connectors.  This is a 90-pin nightmare; I knew I wasn’t going to find an adapter for this thing so I salvaged a connector from a Wallstreet floppy drive module.  By changing a couple of tracks on the connector’s circuit board, I was able to reuse it for the CD drive.  I soldered an IDE cable to the connector legs (I actually used a SCSI cable for this because it matched the iMac CD drive I’m using; the extra wires provided power to the drive from the expansion bay connector).

    image013

    Half way through the solder job, this process took me about 6 hours.

    image014

    Testing the electronics (the small black box at the top right is a 24 to 12V truck power converter; this unit wasn’t very reliable and I later replaced this with my own voltage regulator).

    The back of the unit ended up like this:

    image015

    The switch on the left is to turn the internal speakers on and off, the 5-pin DIN socket is the standard B&O audio out, below that is the power connector, along the bottom you have the PowerBook connectors, and on the right is a red reset button and a black power switch (hopefully these wont get much use).

    The screen is mounted in an aluminum frame that holds it suspended above the motherboard, 4.5mm clear Perspex sits on top of the frame.

    image016

    The Perspex is back-painted in black to give a neat window look.

    image017


    Prior to this mod, my only programming experience was in HyperCard; the learning curve here was kind of intense.  The goal was to create an interface that allowed me to use the existing B&O controls to navigate through my music collection and play tracks.  Currently, I'm storing all my music in iTunes so communicating with the iTunes database was desirable.  I started by writing a program that would ask iTunes (through applescript commands) about its music database.  However, as the database got large, this got painfully slow.  In the end, I decided to have the program access the iTunes library file directly, this is supper fast - even on the Wallstreet.  The program still uses iTunes (which is hidden from view by the full screen interface) to play tracks; this has the advantage of automatic volume adjustment and network accessibility.

    The main interface on the old B&O is a sliding control.  I decided that this would be used for track browsing and selection.  The sliding control has two small wheels for fine-tuning radio stations, I converted these wheels to buttons (programmatically they are left and right mouse buttons, but I had no luck finding a two button ADB mouse so in the final mod the left button is actually wired to the keyboards "z" key).

    image018

    Tracks are selected by name, artist, and album.  If you select a particular artist, then your choice of tracks and albums are reduced to those by the selected artist; likewise for track and album selection.  The right button makes the selection, the left button moves you back without changing the selection.

    image019


    The selected tracks are displayed in a list.  This is much like a jukebox.  The user can scroll up and down the selected tracks with the slider and select, delete or add tracks as desired.  A number to the left of the tracks indicates the tracks position in the list; tracks with a negative number have been played (they also appear in grey instead of white).

    The CD drive is positioned on the left behind the face groove.

    image020

    And so, there you go. For about the same price as an iPod, I've got myself a music player that's around 10 times heavier, 100 times larger and with even worse battery life.  But I’m pretty happy with it and it fits in nicely with my old school B&O amp.

    image021

    image001


    Editor's Note: More information about the Bang & Olufsen mod can be found at Objects in Flux, Scott Mitchell's blog. Thanks again for all your hard work, Scott!




     

     

  • 08-16-2007 7:39 AM In reply to

    • Dave
    • Top 50 Contributor
    • Joined on 04-17-2007
    • Brisbane, Australia
    • Posts 2,328
    • Bronze Member

    Re: GREAT From beocenter 4600 to a modern MAC powerbook

    Beat ya to it! Stick out tongue

    http://forum.beoworld.org/forums/thread/17619.aspx

    “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort.”

    Your health and well-being comes first and fore-most.

     

     

  • 08-16-2007 4:05 PM In reply to

    • Calvin
    • Top 500 Contributor
    • Joined on 04-16-2007
    • London
    • Posts 233
    • Bronze Member

    Re: GREAT From beocenter 4600 to a modern MAC powerbook

    I have admitedly seen that before, but not since I got a Mac myself; It really is a beautiful setup. I've been planning to put together something like that myself, a media centre, encased in an old piece of kit. It would certainly be good to see a completely beyond repair B&O unit reborn like a phoenix into a new addition to a system. My thinking is that when I have the money (probably a spare thousand pounds), I'd like to take a broken Beosystem 5500 design CD player, take out the broken internals and replace it with a Mac Mini and a few disgustingly large hard drives. I could then hook it up to my projector and BeoMaster. For now, one can only dream though
  • 08-16-2007 11:08 PM In reply to

    • Ignace
    • Top 25 Contributor
    • Joined on 03-30-2007
    • Moderator - NL
    • Posts 2,749
    • Founder

    Re: GREAT From beocenter 4600 to a modern MAC powerbook

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