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I see great potential for a Raspberry Pi based online radio player, where the playlist is transferred using a text file on a 3.5" floppy disk. That would mean

by dbrgn 6y ago

I see great potential for a Raspberry Pi based online radio player, where the playlist is transferred using a text file on a 3.5" floppy disk. That would mean that you could choose your radio station (or Spotify playlist) by picking out the appropriate floppy disk and shoving it into the radio. It just feels better than tapping on a button on a touchscreen...

PostOnce 6y ago
For your idea, you could do what a lot of kids toys do, where they have a "cartridge" (puzzle piece, alphabet letter, whatever) which has some notches, so it pushes a combo of switches to select what sound to play Could also do it with barcodes i did this with toggle switches in my car, and they're binary, so the 4 gave me 16 options... per mode, i had a mode button too, in radio mode it was either podcasts, a few SDR options, and a few mp3 music genres then i decided the toggle switches were gonna get embedded in my face if i got in a wreck so i took them out ... there's a reason all the buttons in cars are round and plastic, I guess.
- ficklepickle 6y ago
  We would be friends. Any pics?
- bellyfullofbac 6y ago
  Now I want to build a floppy drive into my car, and each 3.5" disk would be an "album" - of course it would just be a cartridge that the system would recognize to play a particular set of files which are stored internally. It would amuse my friends on car trips, not that I have any of those...
  - dbrgn 6y ago
    I planned to do that with old 64 MiB or 128 MiB SD cards and a car radio with SD support: One SD card = one album. However, nobody still makes SD cards this small, and using a 16 GiB card for 1 album seems wasteful :) But floppy disks would be much nicer.
    - herbst 6y ago
      Try aliexpress you can bulk buy 4gb ones for about a dollar each.
  - hexmiles 6y ago
    I see a problem tho, the floppy don't go nicely with the car enviroment and they will probably become unreadable pretty fast. I had a similar idea but i wanted to embed small nfc tag into some floppy disk and use a broken floppy reader that i own with a tag reader inside the gut of the reader reusing only the eject mechanism and the led, (i will be missing the nice motor noise tough...). I'm also experimenting with other cartridge-style meccanism
  - nereye 6y ago
    Echoes of FlashPath (have one somewhere): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath It is an adapter that takes flash cards (e.g. SmartMedia) and can be used in 3.5" drives.
mpweiher 6y ago
USB sticks?
- _joel 6y ago
  NFC tags too
japanuspus 6y ago
My Covid-project has actually been building exactly this -- except with QR-codes on cards and a dedicated reader. Still in mockup stage, but I really like the prospect of not having to pop out the phone (and inadvertently get distracted) every time I have to interact with my music-system.
voxadam 6y ago
There was a nice Sonos enabled Pi based music player with a NFC card UI written up last year.[1] [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/who-needs-vinyl-records-when-youve-got-raspberry-pi-and-nfc/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/who-needs-vinyl-records-whe...
- outadoc 6y ago
  I've seen some neat Home Assistant-based projects with this concept as well!
yitchelle 6y ago
You could a mix tapes of sorts. Love this idea.
dinofizzotti 6y ago
I've built this exact thing last year! https://www.dinofizzotti.com/blog/2020-02-05-diskplayer-using-3.5-floppy-disks-to-play-albums-on-spotify/ https://www.dinofizzotti.com/blog/2020-02-05-diskplayer-usin...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dbrgn 6y ago
  Thank you internet! This is really cool, just like I pictured it :) My living room RPi based music solution is an old Grundig radio from the 50s, modified so I can control the volume using the actual volume control. Playback sources (currently online radio stations chosen by genre) can be switched using the physical buttons. The "off" button shuts down the Pi. Maybe I'll do a writeup on my blog sometime, in case people would be interested...

by dbrgn 6y ago

PostOnce 6y ago

For your idea, you could do what a lot of kids toys do, where they have a "cartridge" (puzzle piece, alphabet letter, whatever) which has some notches, so it pushes a combo of switches to select what sound to play Could also do it with barcodes i did this with toggle switches in my car, and they're binary, so the 4 gave me 16 options... per mode, i had a mode button too, in radio mode it was either podcasts, a few SDR options, and a few mp3 music genres then i decided the toggle switches were gonna get embedded in my face if i got in a wreck so i took them out ... there's a reason all the buttons in cars are round and plastic, I guess.

ficklepickle 6y ago
We would be friends. Any pics?
bellyfullofbac 6y ago
Now I want to build a floppy drive into my car, and each 3.5" disk would be an "album" - of course it would just be a cartridge that the system would recognize to play a particular set of files which are stored internally. It would amuse my friends on car trips, not that I have any of those...
- dbrgn 6y ago
  I planned to do that with old 64 MiB or 128 MiB SD cards and a car radio with SD support: One SD card = one album. However, nobody still makes SD cards this small, and using a 16 GiB card for 1 album seems wasteful :) But floppy disks would be much nicer.
  - herbst 6y ago
    Try aliexpress you can bulk buy 4gb ones for about a dollar each.
- hexmiles 6y ago
  I see a problem tho, the floppy don't go nicely with the car enviroment and they will probably become unreadable pretty fast. I had a similar idea but i wanted to embed small nfc tag into some floppy disk and use a broken floppy reader that i own with a tag reader inside the gut of the reader reusing only the eject mechanism and the led, (i will be missing the nice motor noise tough...). I'm also experimenting with other cartridge-style meccanism
- nereye 6y ago
  Echoes of FlashPath (have one somewhere): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath It is an adapter that takes flash cards (e.g. SmartMedia) and can be used in 3.5" drives.

mpweiher 6y ago

USB sticks?

_joel 6y ago
NFC tags too

japanuspus 6y ago

My Covid-project has actually been building exactly this -- except with QR-codes on cards and a dedicated reader. Still in mockup stage, but I really like the prospect of not having to pop out the phone (and inadvertently get distracted) every time I have to interact with my music-system.

voxadam 6y ago

There was a nice Sonos enabled Pi based music player with a NFC card UI written up last year.[1] [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/who-needs-vinyl-records-when-youve-got-raspberry-pi-and-nfc/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/who-needs-vinyl-records-whe...

outadoc 6y ago
I've seen some neat Home Assistant-based projects with this concept as well!

yitchelle 6y ago

You could a mix tapes of sorts. Love this idea.

dinofizzotti 6y ago

I've built this exact thing last year! https://www.dinofizzotti.com/blog/2020-02-05-diskplayer-using-3.5-floppy-disks-to-play-albums-on-spotify/ https://www.dinofizzotti.com/blog/2020-02-05-diskplayer-usin...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dbrgn 6y ago
Thank you internet! This is really cool, just like I pictured it :) My living room RPi based music solution is an old Grundig radio from the 50s, modified so I can control the volume using the actual volume control. Playback sources (currently online radio stations chosen by genre) can be switched using the physical buttons. The "off" button shuts down the Pi. Maybe I'll do a writeup on my blog sometime, in case people would be interested...