iPod with broken Play button

[SukkoPera]

First message here, so hello everybody .

I have an iPod Classic 6g with a broken Play button. It's still usable with its original firmware, with a few workarounds, but I was wondering if the situation could improve with Rockbox.

The Play button has 3 functions, AFAIK:

• Play
• Pause
• Sleep/Power Off

In the OF, I can start playing a song by browsing my music and using the Select button. I can also pause playing by removing the headphones jack, but then I can no longer resume playing, I have to go back browsing my music, find the song and start it from the beginning. This is a real pain, since I am used to wear headphones at work, but of course I have to frequently pause my music to talk with colleagues.

Rockbox already has a function to resume playing then headphones are plugged again, which is soooo sweet in my case , but I was wondering if it was possible to avoid this continuous unplugging/plugging thing altogether. I can't seem to find any play/pause functions in the menus, but I thought that maybe I could easily enable them with a custom build. Has anyone already looked into this?

The sleep/power function is no worry, I'll just put the iPod on hold and wait for the automatic sleep timeout.

Alternatively, can I replace the physical button? I am used to dismantling Classics and I have a few dead logic boards which I could recover the button from. I can also use a soldering iron (more or less...). The problem is that the button has some sort of nylon film on top, that I am afraid the iron would destroy during soldering/desoldering. Has anyone attempted this?

Thanks for any hints!

[LambdaCalculus]

You could replace the entire click wheel and button with new parts. Here's a source I like to use:

https://www.ifixit.com/Store/iPod/iPod-Classic

[SukkoPera]

Unfortunately no . The click wheel is fine. The actual failing button is soldered on the logic board, it can't be replaced on its own. It is just triggered by the mechanical pressure of the click wheel, but it is a separate component.

EDIT: Well, it turns out this was just achievable with a few trivial changes to keymap-ipod.c. I've now mapped the Play button to the Select button in the WPS screen, which is fine enough for me!

PS: Slackware user?

[SukkoPera]

By the way, I also managed to replace the physical button on the logic board. It requires some familiarity with soldering and desoldering, but it's definitely doable. No problems with the nylon film anyway! (EDIT: Well, I guess it's actually Kapton tape, so no wonder!)