Meet the Components

Look, look, my box of toys got here!!



The processor:



For the moment, I'm borrowing my friend Mike's Arduino clone - I can just drop it in the breadboard and go. I think I'll eventually end up with the ATtiny2313, mostly because it's the smallest AVR processor that SparkFun has with enough pins. But the arduino is good enough to play around with for now.

The SD card reader:

Not an awful lot to say about this guy. Aside from the fact that it apparently wants 3.3 volts, and the Arduino will only provide five. This'll be interesting...


Audio output:
Audio jack and its breakout board.



Sorry for the image quality; I hadn't quite gotten the hang of closeup mode on my crappy little camera.

Notice how the ground pin doesn't appear to actually connect to anything? All we could think of is that maybe it had a ground plane (is that the right term?) inside. This is probably also the explanation for the mysterious pin in the middle of the board and the jack that doesn't seem to connect to anything.

Audio decoder:
Will be appearing as soon as SparkFun gets the breakout board for the VS1053 in stock. Good god, that thing has more instruction memory than the processor. I was seriously considering punting the processor entirely and running everything on the decoder, but it looks like eight I/O pins aren't quite enough, if I want to have buttons and things. (The other reason why this chip is nice is that it decodes EVERYTHING. No, seriously.)

And our special guest star:

Sketchy 5->3.3V converter:

I don't even remember what this is. It's an accelerometer or something. But apparently it puts out 3.3V if you feed it 5, on top of its other manifold virtues. I'm pretty sure I can run all the components on 3.3V, but unfortunately, the only way I have to get power to the board right now is to plug a power source (USB or wall wort) into the Arduino, and it'll only output 5V. Hence the whatever-it-is (really, the Right Solution is one of these, but I didn't think of it until after I placed the order.)

LCD:


It's just a Nokia 3310 LCD. The internets love them for this sort of thing; they're cheap, small, and ridiculously low-power. I decided to pop it out of the plastic and metal surrounds, but this turned out to be a bad idea. More on that next time...