A Hidden Raspberry Pi Swaps Cassettes for RFID Cards in This Neat Vintage Tape Player Hack

Pseudonymous maker "waymonster" has given a vintage tape player a modern upgrade without losing its classic tactility, by wiring in a Raspberry Pi and hiding an RFID reader in the cassette slot.

"This old Tape player luckily had enough room inside that I didn't need to remove anything," waymonster explains of the project, which is designed to offer quick access to pre-selected playlists at the wave of a card. "It technically still works, just gotta remove the sensor and power it on."

The heart of the system is a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B single-board computer, with a HiFiBerry DAC2 HD digital-to-analog converter for better quality sound than is available through the Raspberry Pi's built-in 3.5mm audio/video jack. The Raspberry Pi runs the popular media package Volumio, connected to a separate network-attached storage device on which audio files are stored in lossless FLAC format.

It's the user interface that impresses, though. Music is chosen by pulling one of a selection of RFID cards out of cassette tape cases. Open the tape player's cassette slot and wave the card at the Mifare RC522-compatible sensor inside, and the chosen playlist immediately begins playing — and can be controlled using the buttons on the player itself, using wiring to the Raspberry Pi's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins and a Volumio plugin.

The project is based on a similar effort published by fellow maker layereight three years ago, published to GitHub under an unspecified open-source license. Where the original was aimed at keeping children entertained, though, waymonster's variant is more likely to appear to adults.

Waymonster hasn't released a build log for their variant, but more details can be found on the project's Reddit thread.