diPlayer Is a Raspberry Pi NFC Music Player

For the 20th anniversary of music streaming service DI.FM, Alex Buznik decided to build a dedicated music player that can receive its streams. What he came up with is a box painted in a nice shade of blue, with a “20th Anniversary DI.FM” label emblazoned on the front. It also has an interesting photo card sticking out of the top. If this looks familiar, it’s actually an NFC-enabled device based on Brendan Dawes' Plastic Player that we previously covered here and here.

This unit, however, is no mere imitation of Dawes’ excellent work, but adds in some modifications to suit Buznik’s needs; he rewrote and remodeled everything from scratch. This includes using an Arduino Nano to control peripherals for the Raspberry Pi running Pi MusicBox, instead of the Espruino used on the Plastic Player. Interestingly, the Nano is actually soldered onto a perfboard, which forms a sort of “HAT-shield” that goes on top of the Pi.

Of course, there were some struggles along the way, and assembling it took many months of work. Interfacing with NFC tags via the reader/Nano for song selection required some effort to get correct, including proper wire management and using an encoder for control gave Buznik some difficulty as well. His eventual solution was to read the encoder directly via the Raspberry Pi itself.

The desktop player is controlled with photoslide frames equipped with NFC stickers, which point to certain channels. It features a physical play/pause button, volume knob, and a small screen that displays the current track. Sound output is through audiojack or HDMI. In addition to DI.FM, the device supports other sources such as Spotify, Google Play Music, and Soma.fm thanks to the MusicBox software.

Code for the new version is available on GitHub if you'd like to check it out, or even make your own iteration of the design!