The Steampunk Media Player

This a recycling project.

It is the recycling of and old lamp. The lamp was not that pretty and I decided to disassemble it and make something new.

I have had the idea to build a media player based on the Raspberry Pi and a small TFT-Display.

So here are the parts:

• Parts from an old lamp
• 1 Raspberry Pi type 3
• 1 128 GByte micro SD-card (for the operating system and the media)
• 1 USB-speaker bar
• 2 green LEDs
• 1 330 Ohm resistor
• 1 2,2 KOhm resistor
• 1 TFT-kit
• 1 short HDMI cable
• 1 step down converter
• Some connector and cables
• A small wooden box
• Some brass edges and nails
• Vulcanfiber or an other material
• 1 switch for power

I put the URLs inside the link where you can obtain the main parts.

I soldered the parts for the stand and polished and cleaned it.

Removing the old dirt and paint was the harder par of the project.

I used a Dremel to remove the paint an than polished it with "Never Dull".

After this I drilled the holes for status LEDs, the power connector, the switch and the speaker.

First I disassembled the USB-speaker bar. Be careful the speakers are hard to remove and you can easily damage the speakers.

Than I build a small frame from wood for the TFT.

All electronics are placed in small wooden box that is glued to the bach of the TFT.

The 12V Power Supply, that comes with the TFT-kit ist powerful enough to drive both the TFT and the Raspberry.

The step down converter converts the 12V for the Display to 5V for the Raspberry Pi.

The status LED for the Raspberry is a special thing. I would know if the Pi is powered down completely before I shut down the power. The TX-Pin of the Raspberry will do that job. I connected one LED via a 330Ohm resistor from Ground to the TX pin. If the Raspberry is down it will switch off that pin.

The second LED is connected via the 2,2KOhm resistor to the switch and it show if the 12V are switched on ore off.

The speaker is "two speakers in one". I do not need stereo sound and I like to reuse the speakers coming with the USB-speaker bar. Two other part of the lamp are used as the holder for the speaker and as the speaker case.

I cut a round peace of wood with two holes for the speakers and glued the speakers on it.

From Vulcanfiber I cut a ring and glued some cloth underneath it to cover the speakers. The ring was glued on the round wood.

Than I glued the speakers into the lamp part. Some rock wool inside makes the sound a bit smoother.

I used OpenELEC

This software comes as SD-card image for the Raspberry Pi and it is ready to use.

Using WIN32Diskimagerto write the image to the SD-card gives you a ready to use SD-card to boot the Raspberry.

During the first boot OpenELEC resizes the SD-card to gives you an extra partition for the media. You can also use external USB-hard disks or USB-sticks to provide the media.

Besides this it is possible to activate several Windows shares to feed OpenELEC via the network.

The quad core Raspberry and the 1GByte of RAM are such powerful that everything runs fast on the new media center.

The movie on the first picture is called Sunstorm and comes form the NASA.