Hopefully people take the source and release a full walkthrough on doing this with an entirely off-the-shelf design. I’ve got a full electronics workshop and two 3d printers and would LOVE to assemble my own music player with open source designs.
Nice project. $249 seems a bit high, but I guess it’s like the Fairphone, they can’t save as much as the large manufacturers do.
Holy f*** $250? Wow well it is not for me then :(
I’m genuinely curious if someone’s published a BoM cost breakdown, I’m wondering if there’s a couple of super high tickets items in the like the scroll wheel and custom PCB cost.
The cost of the scroll wheel cannot possibly be more than 10€ and the pcb cannot be more than 1€ battery is about 4e and display can be 7-8, chip is 2-3e and passives, connectors etc brlow 5. The manufacturing costs of the thing are likely below 40€, even in small volumes. Assy costs are probably about 20% of the total.
Part of the high cost may be investments in moulds for the casing and r&d cost.
Yeah, I took a bit of a poke last night, there’s a couple of ICs in there that could add up a bit I guess, but even being generous I wasn’t getting much last 80.
The cases I saw had the look of a 3D print about them. Original goal seems to have been around 10000, so maybe they’re amortizing the r&d across 40 units, little bit of profit and then went and sold 400 of them - nice win for them if so!
To make it clear I don’t begrudge them their profit especially as they’re open sourcing the thing. The concept and high price has got my creative side going for sure, an ESP32-S3 pro dev board looks like it could handle an sd card, screen, MP3 decode and output to an I2S amp all by itself + BT headphones and WiFi track downloading and battery charging. Slowly talking myself into building a portable podcast machine.
Hey, one of the people working on Tangara here. The case we’re shipping with will be CNC’d polycarbonate, though the same design also works for home 3d printing.
The price is a lot of little things adding up, and we want to be able to do smaller runs post-campaign and still have it be worth our time. I also wish it could be more affordable, but that’s how it be with indie electronics.
Good luck if you do decide to make a little podcast machine! Just be aware that afaik ESP32-S3 can’t do bluetooth audio (see: https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/issues/8675).
Thanks, really appreciate the feedback! Really good luck with the project, love seeing these kind of devices making it into the wild. Yeah totally appreciate the nature of indie electronics/manufacturing in general and your work totally makes it easier and more approachable for a lone wolf like myself to churn out something functional!
Thanks for heads up on the BT audio, my little investigation the other night lead me to the datasheet for the ESP32-S3, the list of peripheral options is amazing, I’m sure I’ll figure something out!
Thanks again and good luck with the project!
It’s a neat project. Costs as much as an iPod :P
It’s a project by an Australian team, so one would assume two things:
- It’s in Australian Dollars.
- Australia has experienced severe hyperinflation overnight (or earlier today, for many of us reading this)
What hyper inflation? I think you need to check your sources mate.
Can I get some sauce for #2? News says nothing of it
I think it has something to do with Taylor Swift
It all has to do with Taytay Swizzle. WAKE UP SHEEPLE! She will be crowned Empress of the World by chief Illuminatus Warren Buffet and the antiChrist Catholic puppet Joe Biden during the Super Bowl halftime show! Only Trump and Dildoboy Nugent can save us!!! /s
It was a joke.
The only source is the absolutely bonkers price – that’s why it’s an assumption.
In all seriousness, if I were to release open source hardware and software, I’d charge a price like that to ensure that my time would be reasonably compensated for what’s clearly going to involve small production batches of hand-built-in-the-first-world items.
While I’d prefer a sort of iPod-like alternative to high-end DAPs like FiiO or Astell&Kern make, this is nice too. If it just had a balanced audio jack, it’d be perfect.
Tembra, his music downloaded. Darmok and Jalad with the AUX cable.
Shaka-khan, when the beat drops
Arnock, on the night of his joining.
Will be needing to check-in on this over time to see if anything is changed or default functions expand just a bit. I have been looking for a good media device for loading my archived podcast episodes/seasons and audiobooks without having all the extra bloat and/or possible malware that can be on lots of similar and cheaper Android players (or the overkill of using an old phone that doesn’t have a aux port). Main thing for podcasts and audiobooks is variable playback speed settings and stuff like understanding audiobook formats with chapters.
Sadly I (for now) have settled on a sketchy Android device that I would love to root so I can remove a specific flagged app that the Play Store always pops a notification about that is not uninstallable like so many companies do. But since it is a no name brand without firmware images to download from their site. I just I only ever put it online long enough for my favorite podcast app to pull new eps or Audible. Though I am planning to eventually just download and strip DRM from my library for having backups.
So if this thing can get variable speed for podcasts and support open/free formats that are specific to books. Then I am sold. I never got to have an iPod back in the day, so I very much like the throwback look of this thing! I do wish it had more RAM though, as I would imagine that it could limit some higher quality formats/codecs (but I am not a dev so maybe it wouldn’t matter). The price seems fair given it isn’t from just another global mega-corp. I hope they pay their devs well to make sure their official firmware updates stay active, and/or put some profits into future revisions and whatnot.
So just saying…I found a pretty simple iPod classic upgrade…you do the battery and swap out hard drive for a SD motherboard which can handle any SD drive you throw in it…
This is the way
Listening to music like it’s 2005 all over again
We need more devices like this. Will definitely pick this up.
It would be a neat gift for anyone that enjoyed the first generation iPod.
This is insanely priced, particularly when you see that it literally loses on everything but battery life compared to the original iPod 5gb, let alone the Classic.
Not quite. It has 1TB sd card storage. That’s far, far better. And it has wifi and USB not just FireWire. Ram is less sure but how much ram do you need for playing tunes?
Aha, I did indeed miss the “external storage” row—mostly because it only uses the “Tb” acronym quite late in the description. I think the difference between Firewire and USB-C is minimal? (ie they are both “fast enough”) but I guess having wifi is a step up (although I always still plug my phone in to transfer music at this point so…)
Where did you read 1TB? The webpage says it supports up to 2TB but doesn’t say it ships with an SD card.
My bad. 2 TB.
If you have chrome browser JavaScript applet as the media player backend, terabytes.
well there also does not seem.to be a multi billion dollar corrupt gang of geniouses behind it. what you do with your data is up to you but im just saying that we can be happy that there are options out there.
They got $136k funding from an original goal of $10k. Did it go to their head?
Sounds kind of cool. Does is support Rockbox, yet?
Dude, I haven’t hear the name Rockbox in yeeeeeears! I had that in my first mp3 player that predated the iPod. I don’t remember the name of it, but Rockbox really improved the interface.
One of my first “hacking” a device was putting Rockbox on a 4 gb Samsung MP3 player in 2010. This device wasn’t meant to play/watch videos, but Rockbox unlocked that capability. It had a tiny screen, but still.
Will buy for the Opus audio codec support alone.
This is all well and good, especially from a nostalgia perspective (in addition to the general pushback against cloud everything); but what I miss most about portable music nowadays is the lack of decent inline remotes (think early 2000s Sony MiniDisc players).
The player stated in your pocket, and the remote handled everything, volume, playback, and even had a dot-matrix screen to identify and navigate playlists!
I had a Sony portable CD player that I used to use for listening to audiobooks as a kid. It also had an inline remote with a screen. One notable feature it had was custom screen messages (dunno why you would need one tbh). Nothing beats setting the remote so that there was an ASCII dick on the screen all the time, and then have your dad give you the look of disappointment afterwards.
At some point the remote was lost, and the laser assembly broke. I miss that player dearly
You need a smartwatch.
I have one - but its touch screen is no replacement for bespoke, tactile controls.
Sound like you just have a smaller smartphone on your wrist. My smartwatch has a black and white (not grayscale) display as well as 5 physical buttons and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
If you’ve never used an inline remote, it’s really hard to explain why they were so much better from a UX perspective than what’s available now.
If I want to control media on my smartwatch, I need to flick focus on my wrist - usually stopping me from being able to fully use that hand, identify the right controls on the touch screen (and that it’s even on the right screen, and not obstructed by notifications) and hope that they register correctly.
Those old inline remotes were basically a useful ‘Bop It!’; control inputs varied: twist a dial, tilt the end, button press, slide, scroll dial and provided full tactile control which could be truly used one-handed (when clipped to my shirt).
It is a true shame that they were left by the wayside, when multiple devices ended up amalgamating into the modern smartphone.
I had and loved my minidisc player back in the earlie naughties. The remote was great, but there was no standardization and it became a single point of failure. If and when it broke, you’d have to get the specific control for your MD player.
It kind of lived on in spirit with in-line volume/call controls for wired headsets on the 4-conductor 2.5mm jack. Those were cool, and standardized.
We could have a return to that, with USB-C, but I don’t think it’d see much more than a niche adoption. Smartwatches and fitness trackers do it just as well, and once you know the layout, you can skip/pause without looking. Plus most cordless headphones/earbuds have integrated controls as well. Streaming at home you have voice controls, streaming in the car they are on the steering wheel or stereo.
The wired in-line remote is really only even applicable to the already niche community of users who refuse to adopt wireless. Considering most of those people are strict audiophiles, only something that has a quality integrated DAC would appeal to them. Thats a pretty specific product for a pretty small market. Not saying it wouldn’t be feasible, but it’d certainly not be cheap and simple.
Tactile feedback is great though. I’m totally with you there…not many watches have physical buttons that you can locate and activate completely unaided by vision.
I will always prefer my iPod Mini with extra storage, new battery and Rockbox like this guy did, and the reasons are:
- better overall build and audio quality
- way cheaper (70-80$ vs 249$)
- better software support (Rockbox is FOSS and has been going on for ages and it’s not gonna stop)
- it actually upcycles old hardware instead of buying new devices and creating more e-waste
- nostalgia value +100 points
OpenNugget 🐍
