Boom Box Ipod Dock / Homemade IHome

This was my first mod, I took the idea from another instructable: https://www.instructables.com/id/PLAY-AND-RECHARGE-IPOD-USING-OLD-BOOMBOX---Hints-a/

I did run into some snags that the guy above covered but i found a way to do better.
I did do this instructable after building it becuse I wasnt planning on making a instructable.

Backround:

I used an old Memorex boom box that I had lying around that the cd player didn't work in.
And this will be for moderate modders probably not for beginners. What i wanted to do was make a ipod dock that would charge and play music though the built in speakers, all within the boom box with no other wires besides the power.

I have an addon that i have yet to do: Add blue led's to the inside of the boom box.

Mine only fits the ipod touch!

Well first I needed a place to hold my ipod while it played music and charged so I decided to dremal the insert that came with the ipod. But I ran into a problem, i didn't want to remove my case when I plugged it in so i did more dremeling to make the slot bigger. Also i had to dremal out a spot in the boom box for the insert to insert into.

After i had gotten the insert to fit into the slot in the boom box I needed to make holes for the headphone cable and the charging cable. Below is the final product! Hot glued into the boom box.

The new ipods have a thing that makes it so they don't charge with universal chargers. That is because the ipod looks for a handshake with a computer on the 2 data pins, green and white, and if they don't find a handshake then they look for those pins to have a voltage between 2.5v and 5v.

To achieve this we must use pull up resistors, a pull up resistor is a resistor that takes the hot and pulls it to the other pins. Below the resistors are the zig zag lines going to the G and the W those are the data lines Green and White. For both of those I used 470 Ohm resistors.

I had 12v supply coming out of the transformer from the power supply. It took about 300mA to run the boom box by itself. I also found out that the iphone and ipod touch pull about 1amp when in quick charge. I looked at the power supply and I decided that it could handle 1A.

I pulled off that 12v source and inputed it into my 5v regulator, I used a 7805 , ask radio shack for a 5v regulator and it will most likely be a 7805. In most cases the regulator doesn't need a heat sink but if you are pulling 1A or more then a heat sink will be desirable and extend the life of the chip. A simple binder clip will do.

I ran into a snag because the boom box wasn't grounded I had to filter the output, the regulator does some of this but i wanted to make sure it was smooth. A Cap - Coil - Cap does a good job. You can see it in my schematic below.

Next we need it to play music. I took the headphone cable and wired it into the amplifier but i found static when i played it. Later i found out that the cd input into the amp has a high impedance and the ipod had a low impedance so i had to match impedances.

A simple T-pad solves this problem, A t-pad is a relationship and below is a calculator to determine the resistors you should use.

http://www.nu9n.com/tpad-calculator.html

A common output for an ipod headphone jack is 33 Ohms and the common output of the built in cd player is about 1kohm, a big defiance in impedance so i had to go from low to high impedance. The problem with this is that i get some volume loss in the prossess.

I lose about 21db and the resistors I used in the schematic below are:
R1 = 1ohm
R2 = 987ohm
R3 = 33ohm

Once i had gone from headphone jack - t-pad - amp i was good to go and it charged and played music!

Enjoy! I hope this gave you some tips on how to build your own!

Happy Modding!
-GamingRobot