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PiZeroWed Mac mini
macmpi edited this page May 28, 2020
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Our venerable Late 2005 G4 Mac mini died in a thunderstorm, but by chance internal CD/DVD drive was fine:
what a great opportunity to have a perfect housing for a first tiny-radioCD build!
Let's take it all apart, remove motherboard and stuff, just keep DVD Drive, plastic bezel mount, and stuck-in a tiny PiZeroW as its new mainboard. We just need:
- PATA to USB board to convert DVD drive interface to USB (or slim SATA to USB depending on your drive)
- USB OTG Y cable to connect PI with the now-USB DVD drive, and power source
- 2 pairs of wires to refactor Power ON/OFF button (green), and unit's front activity LED (red/black)
- a decent 2.1A/5v power source with micro USB cable (cable must be capable to carry over 2A for CD drive operations!...)
Despite all internal metal frames (could be removed eventually), PizeroW Bluetooth & wifi antenna offer quite decent performance.
Adding the following to usercfg.txt
enables PowerON/OFF button and external Activity LED:
# ON/OFF button on GPIO3
dtoverlay=gpio-shutdown
# External activity LED on GPIO 21
dtparam=act_led_gpio=21
Pairing a cheap Bluetooth remote such as original Amazon FireTV (or clones) makes a very compelling overall tiny-radioCD unit.
If Wifi is available, a mpc client such as MaximumMPD on iOS adds-in fine complementary UI to the mix!