NFC Vinyl Records, Now in Delicious Home Assistant Flavor

A lot of us miss listening to vinyl records. Audiophiles will say that is because vinyl has some ethereal quality that just can’t be captured through digital recordings and maybe that’s true. But I think the real reason we miss vinyl is because of the experience, which you don’t get by shuffling music from Spotify on your phone. So, Mar Bartolome used NFC to recreate the vinyl experience and even updated that with a great new Home Assistant interface.

This is an NFC tag-triggered music player built into a cute little coaster holder designed to look like a turntable. And surprisingly, this isn’t the first one we’ve featured. A few months ago, I covered a similar project completed by AKZ Dev that took advantage of the exact same coaster set. But they aren’t exactly the same and the differences are interesting.

AKZ Dev added a motor to theirs, plus a switch on the tone arm. Together, those recreate some of the experience of putting on a vinyl record. An internal Raspberry Pi then streams music from Spotify.

Bartolome’s take is more about connectivity and seamless integration with the rest of her life.

The hardware is purposefully simple: just an ESP32 development board and PN532 RFID/NFC reader tucked into that plastic coaster holder. NFC tags on the miniature vinyl records trigger specific albums or playlists.

But the situation behind the scenes is pretty complex. Bartolome uses Home Assistant for a lot of her devices and decided to bring this turntable into the mix. ESPHome firmware lets Home Assistant receive data from the NFC reader at frequent intervals. A Node-RED instance looks at that data and proceeds based on the detected tag. It tells a Music Assistant instance to start playing the requested music through Spotify.

The result is largely the same: mini vinyl records trigger music on Spotify. But AKZ Dev and Bartolome chose to achieve that in very different ways, which illustrates how many solutions there are to a problem.