>>41081222
They're technically not really still a thing. Sony and most other companies stopped manufacturing them around 06-07, although Sony still manufactures blank minidiscs, and sells them new on their Japanese site (I guess it was a bigger thing in Japan). Occasionally you see indie artists releasing albums on minidisc, but for the most part the entire MD ecosystem is being held up by fans/hobbyists, people are still developing software and and hardware for it to this day. They have a pretty active aftermarket community.

>Is there some existing digital protocol which could be gently persuaded to work as general IO, or do you plan to go analog like with 8bit casette recorders?

The later generation devices all came with USB connectivity and the headphone jacks have a proprietary serial interface that a remote control usually goes into.

I plan to just buy a bluetooth module from digikey, configure the firmware to recognize the leads and then directly solder the leads on a bluetooth module to the track controls (forward, back, skip, play pause) from the remote port internally on the device, and I'll probably 3d print a new housing for the device so that the module will fit inside snugly, and probably add space for a larger battery so both the device mainboard and bluetooth module have power.


Shitty picture kinda illustrates what I'm going for. I also plan on replacing the OLED modules in the front of the device since the early generation displays tended to go bad and dim or completely die.