Devlog 1
Date: Jul 22, 2026, 10:58 AM

At first, I tought the hardest part about this project will be to find a screen apropriate for what I want. Turns out it wasn’t that hard. I found plenty of high ppi oled displays o the ipod cutout size.

I could make this one work, but I don’t know how tight the space will be. I don’t want people that might want to make this prject themselves to cut the plastic window, or even worse, the metal chassis. I really liked this display because it is 800x600 at this small size, making it look better than the original ipod screen, at a higher ppi, it makes it look like Apple’s Retina Displays which I really like.

Also, It is the right orientation, so I will not have to bent the ribbon cable and risk of damaging it.

For the “brain” I was thinking for a while about choosing the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, but I later found out that they make the compute module zero, which is esentially a pi zero 2 w in a compute module. - style package. From what I’ve seen, it is pretty easy to solder onto the PCB.

ClickWheel

I REALLY want to integrate the clickwheel into this project beacuse, what is an iPod without it, right? So I start researching to see if anyone has documented it. I got some spare ipod 6th and 7th gen clickwheels, and I wanted to integrate them, but as far as I know, no one documented them, and after arround one hour of research, I came to the conclusion that the 6th gen clickwheel is the the move. What I’ve seen though is that the 5th and 4th gen clickwheels are pretty documented online. After a but MORE research I found this blog post. It has everything documented about the 5th gen cickwheel and I am going to use that. The clickwhel uses a custom controller chip that makes my life easier. It comunicates trough i2c I think, I’m not sure. I will dig much deeper into this once I finish the other stuff that I have to do in this project.

Other components

For the DAC, I chose the PCM5102A. I’ve used it before and it sounds good. Then I went into kicad and started making the schematics for the thing. Here’s the audio part all done (hopefully - it took a long time).

For the power stuff like the battery charging, I used a IP5306 IC. It is designed for a power bank. But I think it works just fine. From what I’ve seen I need to push it’s button every 10 seconds? I think? That is so it doesn’t go to sleep. That only happens when the power is bellow 45uAmps. I chose this chip regardless of the sutting down thing, which I will take care of, because I like that it has a built in boost converter and battery charging circuit.

For battery percentage reporting, I used a MAX17048 IC. From what I’ve seen it’s a pretty good choice for this.

I also found a footprint and symbol of the Compute Module Zero here. This is a project, but I just extracted the footprint libraries because I could not find a standalone footprint. If this appears as copy pasted is because I initialy started this project in macondo, but now I recovered my screen recording here.