Off to a good start with the first project

So I decided to go with my first proposal for this proejct, which is to re-construct my night stand and hack my cd player to work with an ipod. Here's the original proposal:
So what I've done up to this point is worked on the cd player and successfully hacked it to work with my ipod. I documented the whole process to show how it was done:

Here is the cd player in its normal / unmodified state:
\Here is what it looks like on the inside after I take off the outer pannels:


Originally my plan was to solder a simple audio cable onto the board itself, but after investigating trying to figure out where to solder i realized it was too complicated and there was an easier way to make the ipod work with this thing. I had an old DIY project from Johns 252 class which was pretty similar to this (http://uoregon.edu/~cwilson9/artd252/DIY/1.html). As cool as this little jambox was i never really used it, and I figured by taking that apart and using bits from that to make it work with my cd player would be more useful. So my new idea was to not just solder directily into the cd player but to use this extra chip as a basic amplifier for the ipod and then just wire the output directly to the cd players' speaker output. So technically this method wouldn't be using the cd player at all to play the ipod, just the speakers.

So I took out the old chip from the jambox and proceeded to solder in the input wire for the ipod and the output wires for the left channel.


Here is the amplifier chip:And here it is with all the wires soldered in place:



Once all the wires were soldered and figured out it was time to soder the left and right channel wires into the cd players output.

I unscrewed the output pannel so i could work with it easier.

Heres what it looks like with the wires soldered in place :

After trying for quite a while to fit the chip into the cd player I realized it just wasn't going to happen so my only option was to secure the chip to the back of the cd player and cut a couple of grooves for the wires to feed into. Kind of ghetto but also really cool and dorky looking.

So that's it! I hot glued to ipod chip to the back and it fits perfectly, and looks pretty sweet. To the naked eye it looks just like the ipod is plugged straight into the cd player like it would any other, which is what my goal was for this part of the project, so it was a sucess.

The next part of the project is to start collecting parts for the actual nightstand. I need to find a good solid piece of glass to fucntion as the table top, some good pieces of plywood, some rollers for the drawer thing, and probably a lot of other odds and ends. This weekend I plan on making lots of visits to home depot, bring recycling, and goodwill to start collecting these parts, and if I'm lucky I can start actually working on it this weekend.