A New Spin on the NFC Music Player – Hackster.io

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Streaming services and personal digital libraries beat the pants off of physical media in many ways. They make it possible to have millions of searchable songs or movies available at the click of a mouse. Before digital streaming became king, one would need to have a garage full of physical tapes or discs to have this much content, and the best recommendation systems involved closing your eyes, spinning around, then picking whatever was in front of your face.
Given the convenience of this modern tech, we do not want to go back to the way it was before. Yet something seems to have been lost in this transition away from physical media. Many people now long to have a physical copy of their media to hold in their hands. This has led to a resurgence in popularity of records, for instance, among generations that had not yet been born when they were still a relevant storage medium. It has also inspired many technically-inclined individuals to build NFC-powered media players to add something concrete to their otherwise digital experiences.
We have covered many such players over the years (see here and here, for example). In general, these players have a set of cards containing NFC tags that are simply tapped or swiped to start up a particular song or movie. That certainly adds something physical to the experience, but it is not really very much like any real technology of the past. For this reason, Instructables user lennyomg decided to build a more realistic music player that mimics an old-school record player.
The retro-inspired case is 3D-printed, and comes loaded up with a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ running a Owntone media server that enables streaming from both common services and local media files. An Adafruit I2S 3W Stereo Speaker Bonnet and some repurposed Amazon Basics speakers are used to crank out the tunes. A small DC motor turns a set of gears that spin the turntable. Record-shaped discs with NFC stickers sit on top of the turntable to select the media that is to play by interacting with an NFC reader inside the case.
A set of three knobs was added to control music playback, and a strip of RGB LEDs was also included, beneath a plastic diffuser, that gives KITT a run for its money. The analog inputs from the knobs are read by a Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 development board, which also drives the LED strip.
Quite a bit of work goes into this build, but the final result looks fantastic. If you would like to build your own copy of it, lennyomg has provided detailed instructions, source code, and 3D model files to speed up the process. Go grab it all over at Instructables.
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