The Raspberry Pi-Based Radio Time Machine Is a Sonic Tour Through the Decades

Modern music streaming services are a dream come true for music lovers. Instead of having to go out and buy hundreds of albums just to have access to the songs you like, you can use a service like Spotify to listen to whatever you want whenever you want. The problem is that you lose a lot of the actual experience of listening to music, which is more than simply hearing it. You no longer have the tactile pleasure of putting on a physical album or tuning into a new FM station. To regain that, alexis__reddit built the Radio Time Machine with a Raspberry Pi.

The Radio Time Machine lets listeners select any decade between 1920 and the present. It will then automatically start streaming music from that decade. The music itself comes from Spotify, which is full of playlists for specific decades. The Radio Time Machine reportedly has an average of 500 songs from each individual decade. Songs from each decade playlist are played randomly, so it’s a bit like listening to a radio station in that decade. Tired of listening to music from the ‘70s? Simply twist the dial to tune into a new decade!

It looks vintage, like a vacuum tube radio from the ‘50s, but the Radio Time Machine was actually built inside of enclosure from a modern retro-styled Bluetooth speaker. The original electronics were removed and replaced with a Raspberry Pi 4 and an Arduino Nano board. A Mopidy music server runs on the Raspberry Pi, which pulls music from Spotify (and other services or a local library if you want it to). The Arduino Nano is used to detect the position of the “tuner” and sends that to the Raspberry Pi so the appropriate playlist can be played. The tuner dial label was replaced with one that shows small icons that represent each decade, such as a dancing figure reminiscent of the disco era. The resulting experience is a lot more fun than simply selecting a song on your smartphone’s Spotify app.