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Made by Jokerzip
OK I can admit it. I am addicted to hardware. ANY hardware. This all started as a “fix”
for my iPod. I burned out the firewire port on it somehow. So I set out to get a new board. Long story short I kept ending
up with extra parts. A battery here, a hard drive there etc. My solution… the iBoxx.
I have had two old Amway alarm boxes just sitting around, waiting for a cool project to be thrown
into them.
I did some research on the internet and found that the Toshiba drives from the iPod are actually ide
drives. WOOHOO no proprietary pin arrangement. You will see why I was excited about that later. The original design
did not have speakers built into it. I just wired it up to rca outs and used it in a stereo. After a few weeks with it like
that I decided I wanted to be able to use it wherever I could find an outlet.
This is the original box and the after pic of when I cut the front out.
These are the speakers I gutted for the parts. They are Altec Lansing speakers. They sound great. Ipod mainboard and
hard drive cable used in the buildup.
PC parts I used in the buildup. The hardest part of this build. The ide cable. Each wire in the ribbon cable has to be
stripped and soldered to the iPod hard drive cable. Yeah I know I’m crazy. This is why I was excited about the pin arrangement.
I wish I could have gotten a better picture for this. This took FOREVER. I spent about 3 hrs doing this
not counting breaks. All I can say is patience patience patience. All I could think after I finished was this better work.
This is the plexiglass cut with the face of the iPod attached. To get the face to stay on I had to melt around the edge
of the iPod.
This is the power supply mounted in the box. A pic of the cold cathode tube mounted with Velcro to the top.
Hard drive mounted to the bottom of box. You can kinda see the arrangement inside.
This is the other side of the box with the audio amp mounted to the bottom of the box. And this is the finished product.
The pictures I don’t have are of the back piece of plexi and the way it was before I added the
speakers.
All that and I still wasn’t finished. Luckily I still had a working iPod to get all of the system
files and such off of. Everything works great with the exception of being able to sync with itunes. The computer freezes up
on me whenever I plug the iBoxx into it. I think it has something to do with the firmware on the drive. Other than that everything
works great. Like I said I have two of these. Stayed tuned for iBoxx2. this one I am going to use a usb 2.0 adapter from an
external cdrom to get in to it without having to disconnect all of the cables from the drive.
Thanks for looking,
JOKERZIP
P.S. if anybody can help with the software glitch i would appreciate it.
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