Fixed Lifedrive

Fig 1

Its been awhile since ive used one of these things. Palm OS is really old now, i doubt anyone uses it for a primary device anymore but I had this Lifedrive I modded awhile back that the speaker died on me, also I added a vibration feature to it. the vibration motor was from a broken iPhone 3GS that I had lying around, you can see it on the bottom right corner of the device. I hot-glued it down (all the tape is to keep the ribbon cables safe from anything) and got the lead the wires to the connector. The pins its connected to are from a guide to setup vibration on the Palm TX, the pinout is the same here so I just made the insides fit everything properly, you can see in Fig 1. The driver made for the vibration to work on the software was developed by Dmitry G. owner of PalmPowerups.com . It works by sending data though the serial cable which has enough power to run the motor. The negative terminal is the left most wire and the serial or "positive" cable is on the right shown in Fig 2.

Fig 2

So that much was fixed/modded pretty quick but now my speaker had been messed up and the connection I completely burned off when I was a kid so it was really messed up. I had a General Idea where the pinouts were still so i began searching by playing some music and touching wires to the board (which is not exactly recommended). After I got a sound I realized how much power this device had! You see there are two models of this Lifedrive with only one internal change. The newer models has a crappy audio chipset that was very poor sounding and didnt drive as much, I believe it was to save battery life, but I am not too sure. The older model (which I discovered I had) has enough power to push out 5 watts. Now thats not much by many standards of general stereos but for a mobile device, thats quite insane. my 3x2 inch speaker was well beyond loud and not distorted in any way, and even had bass! So I figured, why not replace the built in speaker with something bigger? The original speaker setup is one small mono speaker, no indication of its rating, and it was busted (wonder why? XD ) so I got a speaker from a toy, 2 watts each and were not made of plastic. The pinout i found turned out I can put stereo on this thing so I did. I was bearly able to fit it all together but now I have a stereo Lifedrive with vibration alarm

The stereo pinout

Portable DVD mod/Intro

The modification was just putting a different power and RCA

Ive been meaning to make one of these for years, and now that I have the time to keep up with them (and the integrity to keep it going) imma go ahead and talk about the things I do on a "when ever i feel like it" basis. My name is Jacob and I have a passion for computers and electronics. I've been messing with them since the 6th grade, and never stopped. I am an extreme end-user, and slight programmer. I also do patching for programs and resource edit things to my liking. I do some electrical engineering stuff, and modify almost all the electronics get. Speaking of which I just finished modifying a portable dvd player this morning after some thought (and seeing it gather dust on a shelf. Its a CRAIG :3 ... no seriously it has that written as its brand name, but anyways it had batteries that went kaput and the dc plug is proprietary. I got this thing second-hand so I didnt have it, also the AV cables were also proprietary. This made it useless up until now. I added my own RCA in/out using the pinouts and wires, made holes and glued the thing down. Same with the power, pinout, solder, make hole, glue. Simple yet its alot of work with trying to get it to fit in there keeping the dvd drive in. I removed it, only to find out it had the firmware to keep the whole show running. so i had to place the RCA in the side and remove the useless batteries on the inside. The batteries are NI-MH and when i disassembled them, were  the size of AA batteries, so i have a butt-load of rechargeables. since there is no batteries, it has to be powered by something... So I used my backpack to power it. Using the AUX power out I made on my backpack I can power the Screen/DVD player.

Proprietary plugs Y U NO BE NORMAL?

This will prove to be useful in college when a dvd player goes out or speakers arnt loud enough, my backpack will come in handy. But its really more for fun uses anyways. Since it uses composite (crappiest video quality ever -.-) I can hook anything up to it like an Xbox 360 or some other useless console machine. The portable dvd player came with a second screen which I wanna use for a portable NES or SEGA Gen build I wanna do whenever i get the guts to pull it off.

In other news im sure your tired of reading boring amounts of text or just scrolled to see the video which would save you time. But attention to detail is important. BTW aesthetics on the dvd player are HORRID! I dont have a drill to use.

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