Cassette USB hack

[GoldenVulture]

I purchased a Walkman stye casstte player that also had a USB connection. It was a whole $10 [ reduced from $12.95 ]


The tape transport is absolute crap and it sounds like someone gargling water.
Because of this I opened it up. Inside was a circuit board with the USB connection, a headphones/line plug and a volume control for the headphones and DC power adaptor . There were also connections for the tape motor, on/off switch and battery connection. and the tape heads. It powers from either the batterys or DC plug or the USB plug.

I have a Yamaha dual deck casstte player/recorder. One side is play only. I opened it up and hacked the  Walkman USB board into it. All I needed to do was mount it, which included cutting a slot/hole in the back of the Yamaha's case.
The heads from the play deck plugged into the Yamaha's main board. I soldered some wires to the head inputs on the PlayerUSB board which inserted nicely into the head plug.  soldered a wire across the switch points so it is permanently on when the USB fires up.Added a ground wire and it was ready to go.





The tape deck's transport is run by the Yamaha and the The Hacked in board powers by USB. I've tried a couple of things and it seems to work fairly well. I will have to compare it to some previously recorded stuff done via analog ins.

[Dr. Vegetable]

Dude, that is a cool hack. I wouldn't have had the nerve to mess with the head connections with my crappy soldering skills.

Now what are you waiting for? Start ripping those Partridge Family tapes!

[GoldenVulture]

If you " View the Image " , it comes up bigger and can be expanded further. Looking at it that way you can see where I've soldered three wires to where the Walkman Players heads were connected. You can also see how I just pushed the wires into the Yamah'as head plug. The wire is around the same thickness of the plug pins.
It's really shit easy. There's not a lot of soldering in the long run. More de-soldering. :toast:

[LesStrat]

Have you seen my solders? They violate the terms of the Geneva Conventions.