u/Decent-Cow2080

Looking on vinted, i found a broken display untested M2 MacBook pro. it had a broken display but turned on. No info about specs, or if it even fully works. i managed to ask the seller to send me the photo of the nand chips, showing me it's 512gb, which made me risk it, seeing the serial number wasn't icloud locked. and that was a score. i expected for it to be 8, or if I'm lucky 16gb, but its actually 24. The battery is almost brand new too, at 62 cycles, 98% health. Unfortunately it had Management, but it's simple to skip, and I'm trying to get in reach with the company who's the laptop is. A display swap later i got myself a glorious 24gb M2 touchbar mbp, and a m1 homelab server, for only $200. couldn't be happier

Hey. For the past few weeks I've been engaging onto my dumb, but very enjoyable project. Adding many QoL features to my CD-i. My final goal would be to have

-wireless controller support, both through wifi (webportal) and bluetooth -USB HID support -OLED screen alongside the original Vacuum fluorescent display for those information. -Home assistant and listenbrainz integration. -CD metadata requesting from the web, by getting cd's information like track amount, length etc -Injecting this data to the OS, modifying the player and embedding it to the original beautiful os -Extra IR sensor, to get it working with my Logitech harmony, because Philips used a proprietary IR protocol, no one reverse engineered, and i don't have one.

I currently managed to do the simple parts. I'll add, I'm really awful at coding, I'm better (still not great) at hardware, so if i did something in a dumb way, sorry, but it works.

Using a kinda old Arduino uno library, i have gotten the system control to work just fine, via the wired input port. I connected the Arduino to a (temporarily) esp8266 with serial, and made a simple webportal, that let me control it. Then, i added a 32x128 i2c OLED display, which wasn't that hard, and also a 3 pin ir sensor. All that works flawlessly, but the CD information is where it's getting actually hard.

My original idea was to get a connection to the serial console, and every boot inject a script that would send me, through a debug port hidden in the input 2 connector, all the data it has about the audioCD, that the microcontroller could parse, and get the data. The first problem i encountered is, that the serial console is using 12V logic, adding extra steps to make it work with microcontrollers. But, for now i wanted to try it out with a windows xp laptop i had laying around. I connected to the serial, and could do low level diagnostics, and even access the shell, but unfortunately only when running authoring programs, not when listening to audio CDs. Now, i have a few other ways i could go on. The first, and most expensive one would be to get a EPROM flasher, and replace the ROM with a EPROM, then modify the system that way. But, Since I'm bad at coding, continuing with trying to play with the original os would be a living hell for me. And i thought about a few different ways i could go on. First thing that came to my mind, would be a ADC, that would connect to one of the audio out ports, and have a Shazam-like tool that would listen to what song it is, and give me the metadata. But, I'm worried about whether it could affect my audio quality, and also, it's pretty junky in my opinion. The other way, would be to hijack and read the i2c communication between the motherbiard and the fluorescent vacuum display, because when a cd is inserted it shows the entire cd time, and the number of tracks, which is not perfect, but could probably give me good enough results in IDing CDs.

Well, I'm not sure what way to take this project. Do i go for the torture and play around with software, or do I just go for the lazy, janky way? or maybe does someone have a better idea how to achieve it? thanks!