Taking Apart a Cassette Player

Last week I took apart a 15 year old karaoke machine to extract the cassette player. I was surprised to see how many of the controls are mechanical, with the tape heads and motor being the only real electrical components.

For my installation, I intend to make all of the controls electrical, through an Arduino. User input will determine what PWM signals will be sent to the motor to control speed and direction of the tape. The play/record head will be wired to a 1/4" plug for use with a standard interface. Once I get controls functioning for one of these tape mechanisms I'll begin looking at adding more mechanisms to create a kinetic sculpture.