[Michael Chen] felt the sound his PSP was putting out needed more dimension. Some would have grabbed themselves a nice set of headphones, but he grabbed his soldering iron instead and found some space where he could add a bigger speaker.
Mobile devices tend to cram as much into the small form factor as possible so we’re surprised he managed make room. But apparently if you cut away a bit from the inside of the case there is space beneath the memory card. [Michael] cautions that you need to choose a speaker rated for 8 ohms or greater in order to use it as a drop-in replacement for one of the two original speakers. But he also touches on a method to use both stock speakers as well as the new one. He suggests grabbing an LM386 op-amp and a capacitor and hooking them up. Yep, there’s room for that too if you mount it dead-bug-style. We wonder how the battery life will be affected by this hack?
is it possible the magnet will corrupt data on the memory card?
The magnet in the speaker would have no effect on the memory card. Generally speaking magnets are only bad near magnetic media such as harddrives, floppies and tapes.
There’s already a magnet in the small speakers on the PSP it self. Gotta take em apart when the screen gets dusty…
Naah,you need a very strong magnet to do that.
If I still had my PSP, I would be doing this right now.
If the charecteristic impedence of the speaker is the same as stock, it will have NO affect on the battery life. Now, your proposed LM386 hack will reduce battery life some. How much will depend on the values of the supporting parts.
it’s actually pretty common to add extra speakers to the PSP, but usually people (like myself) remove the UMD drive and replace it with speakers. this mod is useful for people who don’t have hacked firmware (and thus can’t just rip the game off the UMD to play on a memory stick) and still need the drive. I’ve also seen a camera put back there. I’d be afraid of it shorting some contacts on the circuit board, but if it’s properly insulated it’s a good little nook.
personally, I’ve got four laptop speakers where my UMD drive used to be (two for each channel) and I’ve got four LEDs connected with the sound. they’re positioned on the front underneath a clear faceplate (the two on the left go with the left channel, the two on the right go with the right). I’ve got a DPDT switch wired to the lights so I can turn them off if I want sound but not light.
Harrumph! Back when I was a lad, we had to put our Gameboys right up to out freezing ears as we walked uphill in 4 feet of snow on our way to school and back! We never did cotton to these newfangled color machines. Work of the devil, iffn’ ya ask me!
Few and little holes to make a noticeable bass difference.
Better make more and bigger holes if you want this mod have any utility.
When I was a lad, we didn’t have portable anything, except those handheld electronic football games, space blasters, and bowling.
If you wanted a real game, you bought a “home computer” and hooked it up to your “TV set” using an “RF adapter”. Then you TYPED IN the game from the pages of COMPUTE! magazine, Antic, Analog, etc.
Come holidays, some relative would always mix up your superior Atari or Commodore computer, and get you a book on “Great Basic Games for the Apple II”… and you’d spend your vacation trying to port graphics and sound from one proprietary BASIC language to another.
Whippersnappers.
Hey ScottinNH, I grew up in NH and I taught myself BASIC on my TI 99/4A with the “Teach Yourself BASIC” data cassette tapes. YES KIDS – cassette tapes! And 48k of RAM was more than I could dream of filling 😉
Back on topic – how about a low pass filter before that LM386 so it only amplifies the bottom end?
A capacitor should perform reasonably well as a low-pass filter if it’s sized correctly, mentioned by Mike: ” He suggests grabbing an LM386 op-amp and a capacitor”
Well, there’s my PSP, already removed the UMD drive so I could have a 2-2.5″ driver and an amp chip for bass. Might as well do it, or add solar panels, I really don’t care any more 😛
We can pretty much emulate all that plus more on the PSP, technology is grand (:
lol reminds me…
before the internet gave me Q.B., the real one, (the one with BUILT-IN compiler aka “make EXE” command), the one thats like 25 years old, i used a FREE launguage called A.S.I.C., and had nightmares converting manually from one to the other.
A.S.I.C. is very simmilar to B.A.S.I.C. and intended to carry-over your programming skills, but the coolest commands are missing and must be coded manually as sub-routines… not as fun
PS: QB is the ONLY 25 year-old software that lawyers actually get PAID to go after people for using, seeing as the(most) original (Hard-)disks would have failed by now and anyone using it is automatically considered illegal, even if they paid for it 25 years ago and own the disk, or BASIC/BIOS&BASIC ROM chip… mICROSOFT
PPS: may i add that “back in the day” your computer CAME WITH A PERMEMTANTLY BURNED COPY INSIDE A CHIP! in otherwords… WHERE DID THE LICENCES GO??? HUH??? oh they vanished into thin air??? UNpaid-for??? I THINK NOT!
but if license ownership is non-transferable, does that make it illegal to sell the 25 year-old desktop computer unit with the factory chips still installed??? so all those vintage computers are essentially stolen merchendise??? (the ones with BASIC-ROM) b/c not original owner?… mICROSOFT
now THATS what im talking about! way to go man! yesssss i love it 🙂
… how it should (have) be(en)!