The Elbow cassette player

I think, this has been talked about in here, can someone remind me of what the general opinion was?

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqIEVdgF2Rv/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=75y7bxqurglv

 

I have a feeling they got caught in patent purgatory, and pulled the whole idea down

 

Could you elaborate please?
I've considered making a commercial walkman project as well. If there's anything I should know about I'd be happy to eager to hear about it .

 

Sorry I can’t be more detailed, I was following the Kickstarter campaign until it folded and now the Facebook page only has basic information https://en-gb.facebook.com/ElbowCP/

It is simply a memory of a news article discussing the project ending. I do recall Apple buying certain patents from Sony to make the first IPod, because Sony spent so much time patenting everything for licensing purposes. I’m afraid I don’t have any specific knowledge

 

HERE IS A CRIT I FOUND WHICH DOES NOT GIVE IT MUCH HOPE

The Elbow cassette player concept is as impractical as a cassette tape ...https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/.../elbow-cassette-player-concept-production

 

I have also found this on elbows Facebook page .still seems a dead duck

Elbow Cassette Player - Home | Facebookhttps://en-gb.facebook.com › Pages › Other › Brand › Appliances

 

Having just watched the video on that site, I reckon this could be improved easily. The side that stays flat against the back of the tape, if that were to swing and lock into the other spool, surely that would help keep playback stable, and of they were to put a drive motor in that spool as well, it could play the tape in the other direction without removing the tape? Just my 2p's worth and I'm sure someone will say I'm wrong!

 

Yet another review

the elbow cassette player is a turntable tonearm for tapes - Designboomhttps://www.designboom.com/.../elbow-casette-player-brain-monk-05-03-2017/

 

Here is the 2017 thread

http://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/smallest-walkman-on-eearth.776/

I think the general consensus is that without a capstan, the idea would work as well as the Rokblok record player.



p.s Reading the Verge article above it was the first one which said about using an optical sensor to monitor the tape speed.

That would actually work but leaves three questions

• Will an optical sensor actually work on tape ? (which could be answered by trying an optical mouse on a floppy disc middle,
  
  
• What would the power consumption of the sensor be ? (although the fact that you can get wireless optical mice that run for hours on a small battery means it can't be too high).
  
  
• How much processing power would be needed to turn the sensor results into motor speed ? I'm sure that something like a Raspberry Pi could do it easily but for something like a portable player is big and power hungry.

I now think the idea would be quite feasible if someone was prepared to fork out a few £ Million to design an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) to do all the required processing.

When you look at something like the Apple Watch it shows what is feasible these days. The difference is that Apple probably sell a few Million of each model making it easy for them to recover the development costs.

 

Anyone with the tiniest of engineering knowledge would have seen from the very first look that it would not work or if it did work, it would work very badly. But saying that the hipsters that would buy such products don’t care anyway, for them it’s all about looking cool if you can call that cool. I guess it’s like people who wear their headphones over their beanie hat, they think it’s cool. To me it just looks like they have no clue, which they don't anyone with a working ear can tell you the sound will be muffled.