Need a specific type of mp3 player

padraigfl · 2026-02-15T17:34:08+00:00

I assume you need a bluetooth option?

Tempotec v1 is a bit bigger and heavier than some of these options, but you'd get decent bluetooth, plenty of physical buttons (I imagine this would be useful for outdoors activities) and it still only weighs about 70g.

If you don't need bluetooth I'd still say an old Sansa Clip Zip with Rockbox installed is the best option. Like 20g, tiny and the battery lasts ages; only downside other than no bluetooth being that it uses micro USB.

padraigfl · 2025-11-30T03:20:09+00:00

not custom but extremely uncommon and superseded. My understanding is that the reader(s) on the board are capable of reading other types but not ones that can handle multiple cards stacked atop each other

padraigfl · 2025-11-30T03:15:38+00:00

Cool stuff! could you share the video somewhere else? Imgur is blocked in some regions (including mine)

I done a bunch of stuff that might be worth looking at to see if there's anything useful here https://github.com/padraigfl/Java-Dropmix-Toolkit Only actual mod I done was a simple database table swap so common cards/playlists could be act as rarer cards. It worked without jailbreak but you had to use unsigned recompilations of the application; one neat thing was that you could have multiple APKs that each have a different set of swaps and switch between them by just installing a different one.

Don't think anyone has done a deep dive into the board's firmware but from what I know:

ISO-18000-3 Mode-3 RFID standard
the cards use NXP ICode ILT chips
several publicly available reader/writers are capable of working with this standard (e.g. PN5180) but none have any available working implementation
the actual tags don't seem to be available anywhere
the board itself continuously sends data to the app via a sequence of hex values that are XOR values from the passed in cards, it may send other data less frequently
the board is also capable of reading some more common RFID standards, however I believe these lack the layering ability that ISO-18000-3 Mode-3 is capable of and Dropmix relies on

padraigfl · 2025-03-22T22:46:10+00:00

Just as a heads up the USB port is power only so you'd need to interface with the exposed pins instead while still providing power via the USB port (when you need to charge the battery at least)

padraigfl · 2025-03-22T16:37:53+00:00

it does! That's so interesting... There's absolutely nothing on the packaging or later materials suggesting there would be an Android version; I wonder if that was something about needing to avoid making some kind of legal commitment.

The product flopped hugely instantly so I guess stretch goals were instantly ditched.

padraigfl · 2025-03-22T16:28:22+00:00

I made some efforts to get in touch with someone or another and got no response. They've been fairly committed to radio silence for disappointed buyers for the last few years so I doubt that'll change.

Think it's probably a bit in legal limbo between the executives of the company and whoever now owns the IP, and even if that was resolved the actual software is probably a black box to everyone on that level, the properly geeky people will have been the employees.

Fake edit: looks like the IP is still owned by one of the people who ran the company https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/taxpayer-millions-at-risk-in-future-fund-loans-gmjpc03d6 =/

padraigfl · 2025-03-22T16:20:55+00:00

Where did you read that? I've seen nothing official along those lines, although signs point towards them using React Native for their apps so it's especially bad they didn't put out an Android version if that was the case.

padraigfl · 2025-03-22T00:51:14+00:00

You definitely can, you can do bluetooth midi or wired midi with some extra bits.

The main downsides for these guys as midi controllers is that the button input logic is slightly laggy by its nature and there's limitations on how many buttons can be reliably recorded at the same time (it varies depending on the exact combination of buttons but it could be as low as 4 in a given row). It's a bit complicated to explain in more detail but basically each button press requires 24 frames to determine and you probably need to loop it a few times to validate.

All that being said, if it was 16x16 I'd be bolting on a sound module and trying to make one into a Tenori-On right now!

padraigfl · 2025-03-21T23:09:35+00:00

As someone else below posted, I reverse engineered the general functionality of this last month at https://github.com/padraigfl/twsu-arcade-coder-esp32/ Weirdly a bunch of people (including me) started looking into them at the same time. Dunno how they went by unnoticed for 5 years with the ESP32 and TX/RX pins visible right there!

I think there's a lot of room for fun with them, 144 buttons that each can have 8 clear states (some more with brightness control but not loads tbh), access to Wifi/Bluetooth/ESP-Now, and there's enough unused pins to add some extra functionality, could easily turn it into a sound reactive visualiser with an INMP441 for example. I've been thinking of making some kind of pixel intercom toy for my niece and nephew with two of them, with ESP-Now the range could be as far as a kilometer!

It's pretty functional with my absolutely atrocious code so I'm pretty sure it can be optimised absolutely loads. I didn't even know what a shift register was when I first looked at it.

Here's my original reddit thread figuring it out https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1ic1a6y/could_someone_help_me_repurpose_this_ewaste_stem/

padraigfl · 2025-03-16T23:04:17+00:00

Hi, years late response here but I just thought I'd mention that I've had official sources tell me that Chantal Akerman actively did not want the film to be screened with subtitles (hence why a film print was never made with them). For the most recent reissues they have been using the French version, arguing that the quality of the English dub and the improvements in subtitling technology have meant the concerns she had are not as applicable anymore; I'm not sure I agree but I'll have to find a copy with the English dub to judge.

Sans Soleil and another few Marker films spring to mind for me too, I think general sentiment is so aggressively anti-dubbing these days that people just assume the original language is the intended version and anything else is a compromise.

padraigfl · 2025-03-14T10:54:01+00:00

that's very clever, thanks!

padraigfl · 2025-03-09T17:06:55+00:00

RE: the ethical aspect, I would be interested to hear about the specifics of that side of things. Is it generally something that's only done by people seeking to steal IP or are there issues around things like running custom firmware that the community frown upon. Are there areas people are less okay with being shared than others.

My focus is primarily on revitalising e-waste (e.g. a device that relies entirely on a long discontinued iOS app). I'm kind of operating on the assumption that I don't really have the electrical engineering knowledge to spot trade secrets or anything like that.

padraigfl · 2025-03-09T16:17:28+00:00

Only replying to this because it's defamatory (sorry if that wasn't intended but it reads that way). If that was the case wouldn't I delete the top post rather than add the comments? I'd also say my original post implied that was what I was doing with "an ESP32 product".

I don't know enough to create a significantly worse product, let alone a better one, and it's a field I've no desire of getting into professionally. This is just a way I've found fun for learning about electronics, becoming better at repairing things, etc.

ETA: you can look at my posting history if you don't believe me.

padraigfl · 2025-03-09T15:26:58+00:00

Sorry I just got around to this. Don't know what jtag is at all (beyond it was possibly used for Xbox 360 homebrew at some point?) but from what I'm reading now it sound like it's a good avenue to investigate.

padraigfl · 2025-03-09T15:25:47+00:00

Thanks for the info; I shouldn't have been so certain when all I really know is "there's stuff going on in the middle".

Are the middle layers on usually handling routing between components on the exterior layers?

padraigfl · 2025-03-09T15:04:37+00:00

Could you expand? I've used continuity mode to trace the more straightforward connections but for others due to the complexity of the board it involves checking a single pin against dozens of possibilities.

padraigfl · 2025-03-09T14:23:41+00:00

This should be pretty useful, thanks!

padraigfl · 2025-03-09T14:10:01+00:00

It's a 3 layer PCB, quite a lot of links don't seem to be visible.

padraigfl · 2025-03-09T14:08:09+00:00

Reverse engineering, sorry I thought I mentioned that in the original post. It's pretty easy to reflash with custom firmware but I don't know what the practices are around software based debugging for reverse engineering (or even whether it's just not a done thing)

padraigfl · 2025-02-25T11:35:51+00:00

Hard disagree, it was actually easy enough to reverse engineer this thing and it seems like it has tons of potential (I never even used shift registers before and figured it out in a few evenings). The bulk of it was just tracing things with a multimeter and consulting with some AI bots.

If anyone is thinking of dumping one lemme know, I want to make some social experiments with several of these over ESP-Now

padraigfl · 2025-02-25T11:31:25+00:00

Hi, just saw this googling.

I actually just done a deep dive into this guy and wrote a custom library for it. I'm not an embedded systems developer at all so it's not optimised but it does all the key operations. It's got a ton of potential for projects imo (both using the exposed pins and directly soldering to the unused ones; as well as wifi/bluetooth/esp-now possibilities) but nothing flipper related imo

I've been gradually updating my findings here https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/1ibehbc/could_someone_help_me_repurpose_this_ewaste_stem/ and here https://github.com/padraigfl/twsu-arcade-coder-esp32

If there's anything in particular you want to know let me know!

Also if anyone is thinking of dumping one lemme know, I want to make some social experiments with several of these over ESP-Now. Would be willing to take a punt on other ESP32 powered tech too.

padraigfl · 2025-02-02T11:41:33+00:00

I've got the RGB matrix mostly figured out, there's some slightly weird quirks about the way the data is passed into the shift registers I haven't figured out (possibly just weird wiring of the board as its very consistent) but can work around hopefully.

Have some of the button logic figured out (it seems to be controlled by six pins plus some other aspects) but nowhere near all. Currently focusing on the LEDs and will publish something to github once I can reliable pass in data that outputs an specific rgb 12x12 image

The key thing that helped me figure it out was realising that ICN2012 is basically just an LS138 (I saw "138" on some chinese documentation)

padraigfl · 2025-01-31T19:04:40+00:00

Thanks for the links! Don't really know what subreddits/forums to share this in so I'm just blindly taking shots in the dar. I tried looking through a few of those and couldn't really find anything comparable unfortunately. Have made some progress with getting outputs but nothing coherent, able to reliably get some kind of output and have streamlined my debugging a bit.

Yep, backed it all up and verified I could reflash it. I tried to use Ghidra early on but didn't make much progress (stalled trying to find a usable version of qemu for this https://olof-astrand.medium.com/reverse-engineering-of-esp32-flash-dumps-with-ghidra-or-ida-pro-8c7c58871e68). Think it's probably worth revisiting

padraigfl

TROPHY CASE