So I used to have this old portable Dvd player which was not being used for years. So I decided to do something with it. I 3D printed a stand for it so it would look similar to an iMac. This was all made in one weekend.
Here you can see the 3D printed stand that I created using 123D. I then screwed it to the back of the DVD player. The advantage of this model player was that it allowed me to rotate the screen and close the device with the screen on the outside.
Below you can ser the device with the new stand.
I decided to insert a Raspberry Pi inside the case. For that, I would need to open space inside the case, by removing some unnecessary parts.
The first thing I removed was the charger and the battery, mainly because they were not working anymore.
I then removed the DVD reader itself. That opened up a good space for the Pi, but not enough.
I then started measuring with the Pi to find the best place to put it. The place I choose allowed me access to the USB ports and ethernet thru the outside of the case and gave me access thru the AV and power source on the inside of the case, and there is a good reason for that as you will see soon.
I then proceeded to cut some plastic parts to open up space on the case. I was extra careful to cut the outside/visible parts so I don’t damage the finish.
With this space, I used a screw point to fix the board on the case.
I then start making the cables connecting the AV out to the DVD board. I used a 4pin 3.5mm adapter to connect to the Pi and soldered the wires to the connector on the DVD. For power source of the Pi, I used a mini USB connector also soldered to the DVD main board. I used a voltmeter to find a point where I have a 5V output.
The MicroSD card of the Pi was accessible thru the old DVD access door and can easily be changed.
The final result was very good. The new stand is very stable and strong enough. And the connections on the inside worked great. The screen of this old DVD player doesn’t have a great resolution, being a merely VGA 640×480, not giving you a crisp image a Pi can do. For RetroPie games though it works great, as it doesn’t need much resolution, but it performed poorly when using Raspbian or any other sort of desktop OS, mainly because the controls not even fit well on the screen. It was great being able to give this old device a little bit of life for the future, and hope you like this weekend project.
Oh…did you like the stand? It is available for download at Thingiverse, check it here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2288650
TheRobotDragon 