Since my CD player is unable to play MP3s, I wanted to put a computer in my room that would just be for playing music. But I didn’t want to set up a monitor in my room. So I looked online for another possibility and soon found one. A lot of web pages describe how you can plug in a simple LCD that only displays text. I built one which I could plug into the printer port and then wrote a program for it. Unfortunately I still needed a keyboard for input. I soon found this too much of a hassle and so gave up the project.

Early this year I had a new idea: for a device which would display the title of a song and which I could also use to control the music program (Winamp). I wanted to connect it to my computer via USB. First I made a circuit plan and laid out the board using Eagle. At school I made the printed circuit board. I worked on the casing at home and then finished it up at school. When all the mechanical work was done, I began programming the microcontroller. A microcontroller, an ATmega8 from Atmel, is the central component of the whole device and like a computer has to be programmed first. I did so in the programming language Assembler using AVR Studio from Atmel and a build-it yourself programming adapter. By the end of the holidays I had finally finished writing the nine-page code. Then I began the program for the computer which I wrote in Visual Basic.