Guy Dupont's HotClasps Aim to Bring Back the HitClips Player — And Now Boast Bluetooth Support

Guy Dupont is single-handedly trying to bring back the HitClips craze, designing a USB-programmable system for recording your own cartridges — and a Bluetooth-capable cartridge for those who prefer their early-2000s lo-fi music delivered wirelessly.

"This is a cartridge that I made in an attempt to bring the [HitClips] format back from the dead," Dupont explains of the HotClasps project, "and into the 21st century — Further into the 21st century. My cartridges hold roughly five hours of audio and sound decidedly less horrible [than the originals], and perhaps most importantly the work with all of the original old HitClips players."

Tiger Electronics launched the HitClips player in the year 2000, when you could entertain the commercial release of a surprisingly bulky portable digital music device limited to low-bitrate monaural snippets just 60 seconds long. Despite its technological limitations, the HitClips range would last a solid five years before more capable devices supplanted it in the market — and there are those, like Dupont, who still have a soft spot for the music cartridges which doubled as a keychain accessory.

With only 80 60-second cartridges ever released — plus a couple of fistfuls more in the later HipClips Disc format, which extended play time to a generous two minutes — it's easy to get bored of the format's limited commercial releases. That's where HotClasps come in: HitClips-compatible cartridges which can be programmed with the arbitrary audio of your choice, and that — thanks to the march of Moore's Law — hold from 10 minutes to over five hours of audio, depending on model.

The custom cartridges, driven by a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, are based on a semi-custom audio format — eight-bit 24kHz pulse-code modulation (PCM), DUpont explains, "but some of the bits are rearranged to make it easier to crank out of the PIO [Programmable Input Output block]." At present, songs need to be transcoded manually — though Dupont is working on a web-based audio converter to make the project easier to use.

That's not the only thing Dupont is working on, either: in addition to the five-hour-plus cartridges, the maker has designed and built a version which includes a Bluetooth transceiver — allowing any HitClips player to act as a Bluetooth audio sink. "I made a Bluetooth HitClips cartridge," Dupont explains, "and turned my old [HitClips] karaoke player into the worst Bluetooth speaker in the entire world."

Dupont is selling beta 10-minute HotClasps via Etsy at $32, one per customer, including the cartridge, its housing, and a USB adapter for programming. For those who would prefer to make their own, the hardware design files and software source code for the project are available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.