Arduitape

[Buleste]

A friend and I have designed and built a simple Arduino based wav player with full motor control for use as an tape player for 8-bit machines. At the moment it's proven working for Electron and MSX but the more computers it's tested on the better.

I'm in the process of documenting how to build so here's some of the verboard circuit designs.

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[Tiago]

Hi Buleste, as an Arduino fan and ZX lover, you got my attention! :)

Can you explain better what are you doing? A wav player? Is is something like a pcb with a sdcard to read wavs and then a 2.5 jack as output? Motor control for use as a tape?? How's that? Do you want to create a cassette loader?

[Buleste]

The reason for motor control is because, certainly on the MSX, many tape games need to be paused whilst loading for the computer to draw a loading screen etc. and on a tapeplayer this is controlled by a 2.5mm jack however playing through a normal wav player/iPod/Tapdancer you have to pause the playback yourself or the game will not load. With this you have plug in the 2.5mm jack and it pauses or stops the wav playback which means you can also load multiload games easier.

It's a Arduino Nano with a serial I2C 1602 screen, an SD card, a 2.5mm female jack, a 3.5 mm female jack, and a LM386 amplifier.

At the moment you have to convert the tape files to WAVs and then put them on the SD card but eventually we want the conversion to be done by the Nano as well.

Here's (https://github.com/sadken/ArduiTape) the Github for the original version which uses a standard 1602 screen.

How my final build looks.
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[Stephen Coates]

That sounds good. I might have a go at building it.

[Tiago]

Sorry, my English play's tricks on me. I still don't understand what you mean with motor control, do you mean a real motor like the ones you got on a tape loader?
I don't know MSX, but for an ZX you would just need the functions to play/pause/stop the wav, maybe fast forward to find next levels, like outrun as example.
The MSX needs to pause the loader? Does it give the order to the loader, automatically? where the motor fit in this?

[Buleste]

In a cassette player the computer would tell the tape player to pause the motor at certain stages of the load with the Arduitape it pauses the wav playback.


I have started writing a blog on how to build the Arduitape Mark II here. http://arduitapemarkii.blogspot.co.uk/

[Tiago]

That's great! i think i am going to try it. I have a nano stopped at home, so i will use it. The resistances i have, buttons to, lcd ok, but i need to order the capacitors and the sdcard.

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Buleste, can you put full reference for resistances please? I found a lot of different ones for 4.7k as example.

[Buleste]

I'll be honest and I just got any old 4.7k resistors and they work. I had some old ones from a C64 project and I also bought some new ones and as far as I can tell if it's a 4.7k resistor it will work.

This is the circuit that my friend based the prototype build on. I just refined the veroboard design.

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