Put Your T-LoRa Pager to Work as a Media Player
No one to talk to on your LILYGO T-LoRa Pager? Turn it into a Melody Machine and play MP3s and internet radio instead.
Do you happen to have a LILYGO T-LoRa Pager? Using this device, you can send messages to your friends over long distances without relying on cell towers or paying for a service contract. Pretty good deal, right? It is, at least, until you realize that you only know one other person who has a T-LoRa Pager, and they happen to be your roommate, so you don’t need LoRa to communicate.
However, it is still a very cool little handheld gadget, so it should be put to good use. Redditor w3dada has a T-LoRa Pager and wrote some custom firmware that gives it a new purpose. In this case, it transforms the device into the Melody Machine, an MP3 player and internet radio with all the charm of an early-2000s PDA.
Equipped with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, the T-LoRa Pager is infinitely hackable and highly accessible. This made it simple for w3dada to develop new firmware and flash it to the device. As it currently stands, it supports playing MP3 files stored on an SD card as well as internet radio via M3U playlist files over Wi-Fi.
The user interface was built with LVGL and really makes the Melody Machine feel like a polished product. User settings are stored on an SD card, and there is room for adding additional capabilities in the future. The dual-core design of the ESP32-S3 would make it possible for more services to run while music is playing.
If you’d like to try the Melody Machine out for yourself, the full source code and a binary firmware image have been made available in a public GitHub repository.
R&D, creativity, and building the next big thing you never knew you wanted are my specialties.