Combine the Convenience of Spotify with the Vibes of Vinyl
AKZ Dev built this device that plays an album through Spotify with the tactile experience of loading a record.
Listening to a vinyl record is a journey, complete with tactile engagement and the listening experience that the artist carefully created. But let’s be real: Spotify is just so much more convenient and affordable. To bring the best of both worlds together, AKZ Dev built this device that plays an album through Spotify with the tactile experience of loading a record.
This is a small device that consists of a miniature record player that accepts miniature records. Except those are just dummies that are part of a novelty coaster set. The tone arm does swing back and forth, but the record player and vinyl records are completely inert.
For this project, AKZ Dev made them functional and able to actually play music. Except that music isn’t housed within grooves on the records, it streams from Spotify. The turntable has an RFID reader hidden underneath, which reads RFID tags on the records. When the user moves the tone arm over the vinyl, the system reads the attached RFID tag and begins streaming associated music from Spotify as it spins the record. That could be a specific album, a single song, an entire artist’s library, or a playlist.
A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W does the heavy lifting here, monitoring the RFID reader to scan tags. A Hall effect sensor detects when the tone arm swings into position and the Raspberry Pi turns the record by rotating a stepper motor through a ULN2003 driver.
The rest is software, which AKZ Dev built in Python. It performs the tasks described above and links to Spotify as a custom developer app. As a bonus, other Spotify devices (like an Echo Show) can display information about the music currently playing on the same Spotify account. That’s nice for users who want visual feedback and more details than the spinning record alone can provide.