This DIY “Radio” Features Beautiful Retro Styling

Good design is incredibly difficult to achieve. Most of us can’t do much better than mimicry and a hope for the best. But Zion Brock seems to have phenomenal design sense, because he created this DIY “radio” with a beautiful retro style that is incredibly appealing.

This may look like a radio from post-WWII America, but it doesn’t actually play the radio at all. It plays local music files directly. But Brock built this for his father, who lives in a memory care home and has difficulty operating modern tech. For that reason, Brock put special care into making it as intuitive as possible to control.

The big knob on the from turns the device on and adjusts volume. The only other control is a button on the top, which the user can push once to go to the next track. Pushing it twice goes to the previous track. Pushing it three times restarts the current album. And finally, holding the button down goes to the next album.

That’s all possible thanks to an inexpensive Waveshare RP2040-Zero development board clone, which plays music through a DFRobot DFPlayer Mini MP3 player module with audio files stored on an SD card. The DFPlayer has a built-in amplifier, so the only other necessary component is a speaker. But Brock included a dedicated amplifier module for additional volume.

To give playback some vintage flair, Brock added a feature where the RP2040 itself stores a small “radio tuning” audio file and plays that back when it first turns on.

All of those components fit into that stylish enclosure, which is 3D-printable. If you want to make this yourself, Brock uploaded the files to MakerWorld and published detailed instructions on his website.