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Plastic Player2: the Open Source Music Controller

By on February 22, 2018
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Plastic Player 2 is an open-source analog interface for digital music. It merges the benefits of digital music streaming with the tactile appeal of physical media.

The heart of Plastic Player 2 is a Raspberry Pi running the MusicBox image, which uses the Mopidy server to stream music from a variety of services. But, the real magic is handled by an Espruino. That has an NFC reader, which is triggered by small plastic cartridges with NFC stickers and 35mm photographic slides.
When a cartridge is placed in the Plastic Player 2, the Espruino uses NFC to gather its ID. If that ID is already registered, the corresponding music is played. If it’s not recognized, the ID is displayed on a small Adafruit SPI OLED screen, so it can be setup to play a new song, artist, album, or playlist.

If you fancy building your very own, the maker Brendan Dawes has kindly published everything you need via his Github page. Enabling anyone to build their own and of course improve on it or tweak it as desired.

“Whilst I’m sure it might sell a few units, the journey going from a prototype to full product, complete with back-end system not to mention all the support that would be needed is a big one, so instead I decided to redesign it and publish all the details on Github , where anyone can go along and make their own and of course improve on it. I use mine every single day and it’s as real joy to do so. I’m looking forward to seeing what people do and how they make it their own.”

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About Luca Ruggeri

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