InstaBox v0.1

InstaBox it’s a very very easy electronic project. It’s about a box with 4 buttons, a MicroSD slot and a speaker. When one button it’s pressed, it plays one of the 4 mp3 files that are in the MicroSD, the main idea it’s that files would be like the ones from myinstants.com.

Components

• 1 DFPlayer Mini
• 1 MicroSD Card
• 4 Buttons (in different colors if it’s possible)
• 1 5k6  resistor and another one of 4k7
• 1 Small PCB
• 1 Altavoz
• 1 USB wire
• Wire
• Soldering tin
• Printable parts
• Foam
• 4 screws for plastic

The first version included a Beetle but it freezes because the communication with the DFPlayer was through the serial port, so I decided use the ADKEY from DFPlayer.

Tools

• Soldering iron
• Dremel (optional)
• 3D Printer (optional)

The Dremel is for cutting the PCB and the 3D printer for printing the box.

Instructions

Basically just put the components in the PCB and weld them as shown in the next paragraph, but first I recommend to follow this steps (steps in italics are optional, just in case that you want to use the box that I designed)

1. Print the printable parts.
2. Cut the PCB and foam in order to fit them in the box, the foam should have the same shape that the PCB.
3. Put the buttons, the DFPlayer and the resistors in the PCB, make sure that the buttons are properly adjusted to the PCB.
4. If you are using an old USB wire (like one of a mobile phone charger), cut the end that doesn’t connect to the computer or charger. Usually inside a USB there are 4 wires, please check with a multimeter that between the red one and black one are 5 volts.
5. Weld the components as shown in the assembly sketch, I highly recommend to read the “things to keep in mind” before start welding.
6. Put the foam in the box, below the PCB, set the cap and screw.
7. Format the card in FAT16 or FAT32, make a folder called mp3 and paste the mp3 files in it, later I tell how to download and put the files properly.

Assembly sketch

This is the assembly sketch, as you can see it’s very easy.

Things to keep in mind:

1. The resistors may not have to be the same that I indicated, according with the DFRobot wiki, they should be 3k resistor but I had to replace it with a potentiometer and keep trying until the tracks 2 and 6 reproduced.
2. The buttons has 2 sides with legs. If we put them as shown in the picture (one side up and one down), the legs on the left are short circuited and the ones on the right too, so be careful because if you weld the wires in two short circuited legs, it’ll be like the button it’s always pressed.
3. If you use and old USB calbe, please check with a multimeter who are the correct wires for take 5v and apply them to the DFPlayer (5 volts to VCC and GND to GND).

Download and transfer sounds

As I told at the beginning of this post, I get the sounds from myinstants.com, the download and transfer process are the following:

1.  Open myinstants.com and make click on the name of the sound that you want (below the button).
2.  Once we got the button page oppened (for example, BADUM TSS one), make right click on the link that says Download as ringtone, and select Save Link As… and save the file in the mp3 folder created in the step 6 on the instructions. Repeat this step with another 3 files.
3. When we’ve got 4 files on the mp3 folder, we have to rename them so that the names starts with 000X where X can be 1, 2, 5 o 6, if we want to keep the name of the file, for example, with the BADUM TSS file, the name should be 0001joke_drum_effect.mp3.
   If you wired the buttons as in the sketch, then the bottom left button plays the file that starts with 0001, the bottom right one the file which starts with 0005, top left 0002 and top right 0006.

Gallery