Motivation

I’m really into music, and I love the idea of having a physical collection of music to rifle through and pick from. However, I don’t own a record/cassette/CD player (yet!). I also find it really annoying that in order to listen to music, I need to find my phone, connect to a bluetooth speaker, open Spotify, and choose something to play. I’m addicted to my phone as it is; I don’t want another reason to have to pick it up!

Thus, I came up with “Vinyl”.

What is Vinyl?

Vinyl allows you to interact with your Spotify audio collection as if it were a collection of vinyl records. Different “cards” each contain an RFID sticker encoding the Spotify ID of a piece of content (playlist, album, artist, song etc). When a card is placed on the player, an ESP32 in the player uses an RFID reader to read the Spotify ID and plays the content through integrated speaker drivers, or a Spotify Connect device on the network.

I designed and printed an enclosure, and pitched the product to a city-wide enterprise competition, where I was awarded £2000 to develop the product further.

I’m still working on this, to this day!

Photos