1968 Transistor Radio “Internetified” with a Raspberry Pi
Have a vintage radio collecting dust somewhere? Give it a new lease on life as a Raspberry Pi-powered music playback device!
Raspberry Pi single-board computers have revolutionized what we can do with technology. They’re not the fastest processing devices available, but with the gigantic community surrounding it, if you want to mod device X to do performance Y, there’s a good chance someone out there has already written code that can be adapted to suit your needs.
A great example is this vintage 1968 Sony transistor radio, which with the addition of a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a HiFiBerry MiniAmp was taken into the 21st century as an Internet radio player. Software-wise, creator “arkiser13” simply loaded Volumio onto a 32 GB SD card and hooked up the units speaker. While not that impressive by today’s standards, 32 GB will hold a huge amount of MP3 files, and that particular piece of software allows access to content stored on a DLNA server, as well as Internet radio options like Spotify and YouTube.
Making this setup even better, it's powered by a 1500mAh Li-Ion battery along with a TP4056 charger, enabling mobile or set-top usage. So the next time you’re cleaning out your garage or other storage space, don’t forget to consider if you can make something new out of an old and/or broken device. In this case, it was just a matter of connecting a few wires and flashing the correct software!
To see it in action, just roll the footage below!