HOWTO: build a cassette tape emulator out of a BeagleBone and display cape

[ckoba]

Now that I'm seriously ramping back into the TI world, I figured I should probably document some of the weirder useful things that I'm doing.

 

You all may remember my thread about the cassette jack, and how it was wired incorrectly for current playback gear. What I mentioned only in passing, but did not document, is the setup that I use to emulate the cassette player.

 

I don't use a PC per se; I use a BeagleBone Black with a 4D display cape/shield. I don't use .wavs generated by various Windows applications; I use the https://github.com/christopherkobayashi/TI99Utilities/blob/master/ti_bin_to_wav sine wave generator instead.

 

What I haven't done thus far is document how to set up the BeagleBone Black as a playback unit. Getting the display bit working right under recent (> 3. kernels was non-intuitive, but I've worked it out. The end result is a small box that presents .wavs to be played back into the TI, with no external interface or dependencies whatsoever, basically a HxC for the cassette users.

 

I've put the writeup on my TI blog at https://www.disavowed.jp/index.php?/archives/20-Building-a-TI-994A-cassette-deck-emulator.html,in case anyone wants to replicate the setup.

 

Enjoy.

Edited March 25, 2016 by ckoba

[+Ksarul]

Ooohhh, another BeagleBone use case!

[Vorticon]

Very nice hack.

As a side question, why do you favor the BBB versus the RPi? I've only used the latter as it seems to do everything I need from it...

[+Lee Stewart]

Very nice hack.

As a side question, why do you favor the BBB versus the RPi? I've only used the latter as it seems to do everything I need from it...

 

Well—it is made by Texas Instruments!

 

...lee

[ckoba]

Very nice hack.

As a side question, why do you favor the BBB versus the RPi? I've only used the latter as it seems to do everything I need from it...

 

a) I had a bunch of them left over from a previous project and b) the LCD display shield was easily and locally availabe. The same can be done with a rPi if you can track down a LCD shield.