Computer Audio CD Car Player

Computer Audio CD Car Player HOWTO

We're going to connect that old, damaged!! Computer CD drive to you Car to have a nice working CD audio system in your car.
This is an easy hack to fit your Computer CD drive into your car.

Main Parts needed:

- 1 Computer CD drive
- 1 7805 Voltage Regulator
- Some wire
- 1 Car (of course)

Computer CD drive

For this project you can use a damaged CD drive, yes damaged. What does it mean? Computer CD drives can get damaged and be unable read data in your computer but usally they can still play audio CDs. An easy way to test this is to connect your CD drive to your computer using only the power plug and a headphones on the front panel, put an audio CD in and press Play button on your CD drive. (Note that not all the CD drives have a Play CD, you must get one with it) if you can heard the music then this drive is "car-compilant".

7805 Voltage Regulator

This device is the key in this project, it converts your car 12V to 5V. Be careful with it because while in use it gets very hot and needs to be attached to a squanderer.
Download the 7805 zipped pdf specifications

Some notes
The front audio output is used instead of the rear, because you can control the volume with it.
The CD max volume is low, and it's avisable to use a sound amplifier if you really want to hear it loud
We assume that you know what wires in your car correspond to speakers, the 12v and ground. Because it varies from car to car.

Disadvantages:
Sometimes depending on the terrain you are driving on, the CD drive will produce some audio cuts and jumps.

This is the main schematic
Join the two CD-ROM ground wires (black) and connect it to Car -12V and the middle pin on the 7805 power regulator
The Car +12V to the yellow (+12 on you CD) and also to pin 1 on the 7805, then it will produce +5 output on pin 2 that must be connected using red wire to your computer CD drive +5

The CD computer drive, the 7805 and the power plug interface

Soldering wire to the 7805. Be carefull to don't shortcircuit them!

Now the 7805 pins are isolated, lets be sure which is each wire.

The drive with an old radio-car front panel "adapted"

This will be the result

We attached the power regulator to one side and "provisional" red isolated band to hold it.
This is not a good idea, because when it gets hot will fall off.

It now looks good, it's time to test it.

Testing for the first time inside the car using headphones.

Oopps a shotcircuit occurred because a bad connection, we checked the car fuses and must change one of them

A good idea is to test the CD on the computer before using it on the car. We'll use only the +12 and ground computer power supply wires as it were on the car

Trying to understand the Car wiring (rigth and left speaker, +12 and ground)

Putting the drive in

Do it carefully

Now it's in

We tested it in a short trip and the result was good enought

You can take a look to this short (10 frames) Video

We call this: SorgoCD, and haven't seen it on other web sites till now.
Yo must know that we only killed 3 CD drives in this experiment, also two or three 7805 voltage regulators :] so be carefull.
If funny to do it, but we are not responsible if you blow up yor car, your CD drive our your city. Do it at your own risk.

There is and Enhanced version of this project that can be found here. Thanks to our visitors feedback.
This project was on Slashdot.org on 2001 May, 15 and was very commented there follow this link [slashdot.org] to see it. Remember that our main page is www.sorgonet.com where all our projects are published.

by DrDoom