A Pile of Old iPod Nanos Can Replace Your Triple-Monitor Setup

In many ways, it is a shame that smartphones took off, because they decimated the MP3 player market. And that market was absolutely buck wild in the 2000s. Of the MP3 players from that era, Apple’s various iPods were the most “normal” by simple consequence of being the most popular. But even those were pretty weird and had a lot of features most of us didn’t know about. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this triple-monitor setup that works from an iPod Nano.

The cool thing about this is that it is entirely achievable without any modifications, using hardware that was (or would have been) available at the time of this iPod’s release. This is the 6thgeneration iPod Nano, which came out in 2010. That was late in the iPod era and it had features that weren’t present on previous models — though it also lacked some of the features (like video playback) of earlier generations.

Will It Work? chose the 6th generation iPod Nano on purpose to get the feature set necessary to pull of this setup. The result is the iPod Nano feeding three different monitors simultaneously, plus microphone input (with voice recording) and audio output. It can even set the time on a compatible clock.

The interesting part of this — aside from the fact that it is possible in the first place — is how many different accessories are necessary to get it working. This wasn’t something Apple ever intended, so it requires some creative signal flow.

That flow starts with a 16-pin adapter meant to make iPod ports more accessible in thick cases. That connects the Nano to a special keyboard dock meant for an iPad. The Nano can’t receive keyboard input, but that dock has composite A/V and USB output. With the 16-pin adapter between the Nano and keyboard dock, there is enough room to connect a microphone cable directly to the Nano’s 3.5mm jack. The dock’s composite A/V output then goes to the first TV’s input. That is a Sharp TV with many interfaces available and it can daisy-chain output to the other two Sharp TVs. Finally, the keyboard dock’s USB cable goes into an adapter on a compatible clock radio to set the time automatically.

The “cheat” here is that all three TVs show the same image. And because the 6th generation Nano can’t play videos, the TVs are really only good for slideshows.

Regardless, this is fascinating to see in action and proves that MP3 players were pretty dang interesting back in the day.