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If your board fabrication and soldering skills are up to it, you can make your own tiny MP3 player. This rendition is just about half again as large as a standard SD card, whose slot is on the bottom of the board seen above. The heavy lifting is taken care of by a VS1011 MP3 decoder which also has its own stereo headphone driver on-chip. There’s no display and it seems that most of the 4k of program memory on the PIC 18LF88 is being used. Too bad, we’d love to take this to the next level, attaching it to the head unit in a car and spoofing the communications as if this were a CD changer.

This small DIY MP3 Player is much like the Apple Shuffle. Not a simple project since it consists of all tiny surface mount parts. The code for the 18F88 is available for download so you can build your own.

“This player features a shuffle mode, basic track navigation, volume control, FAT32 support, fragmented file support, an unlimited number of files on the root directory, and high quality playback. Files at 256Kbps can be played without a hitch. Variable bitrate files are supported with peaks up to 320Kbps.

WAV files are also supported, but they have to be less than CD quality unless you put a faster oscillator in the pic.”