Sometimes one person's blunder is my chance to make something cool that everyone wants. Case in point: one of my friends here at work inadvertently threw her iPod Shuffle in the washing machine when it was attached to her laundry, effectively bricking it. (Does this term even apply to something as small as an iPod Shuffle? I guess it's akin to saying that you have footage when you've taken video on a camera that has no film or tape. Ah, this modern world...)After futiley trying to dock it in hopes that iTunes might recognize it and allow a reset, I decided to open it up and look inside. I didn't expect that I'd find anything that looked wrong, as these small circuit boards are almost completely composed of surface mount components and are washed after their wave soldering step, so I knew that the electronics were probably still good. I suspected that the lithium ion battery was probably not that happy to be dunked in soapy water and was rendered useless during the wash cycle.
It wasn't very easy opening the tiny case and removing the circuit board, but I found instructions online that helped me along. Once I had the thing open and put a meter to the battery, I discovered that it held no charge whatsoever. Still, I decided that the only way to see if the shuffle was still functional was to connect a battery to the terminals. I didn't have any tiny lithium ion batteries handy so I used the next best thing: a battery from a cordless phone whose charger I had lost years ago. It had almost the same voltage as the old battery, 3.6V instead of 3.7V and knowing that the iPod probably wasn't going to be that picky, I went ahead and soldered the battery in. I connected a pair of headphones and to my surprise, music started playing.
My next action was to see if iTunes would recognize the tiny skeleton of an iPod Shuffle. I had a docking cord from Monoprice.com that allowed me to plug the Shuffle into the USB port of my computer without the annoying docking station that normally comes with an iPod Shuffle. After a few moments, the Shuffle appeared in the menu. I decided to restore it so I could find out if I could upload music to it. After it restored, I found I was able to load it with music.
So now I was stuck with the tiny circuit board of an iPod with a battery 5 times bigger than it. What to do? I decided to glue it to a block of acrylic approximately the size of a normal iPod. After carefully removing the navigation disc from the shell and attaching it to the buttons on the circuit board with some super glue, I carefully aligned the headphone/USB jack, circuit board, and battery on the acrylic block. I bought the block at a local craft store; normally they're used as a stamping block for clear acrylic stamps and as such, had an alignment grid etched onto the back. The grid comes in handy for aligning the various components on the block before glue and high-strength double-sided tape attaches everything permanently.
Once I was done, I ended up with a rather cool looking device. Since the new battery has 7 times the capacity of the old one, I decided to see just how long it would last. After fully charging the batteries, I connected a pair of headphones, turned it full blast and let it run. I left it in a spare bedroom with the door closed and check it everyday after I came home from work. It ran this way for 7 days. I charged it again and tried to see how long it would run at half volume. I got impatient after 10 days and turned it off.
I tried giving it back to my friend, but she told me to go ahead and keep it since I had put in so much work into it, and besides, it was a lot bigger now and didn't have the clip that made it perfect to take along on runs. Other friends did want one and have been offering their dead Shuffles to me to convert into Acryl-iPods.
