Easy-To-Use Music Player Relies On RFID

Microwaves used to be simple to use. Set the dial for the desired time, and hit start. Then, everything went digital and the average microwave now takes between four and six button presses in precise order just to start heating. Music players have gone down a similar path, and those that grew up in the era of vinyl records can find modern digital media simply too hard to work with. To solve this problem, [ananords] whipped up Juuke, a music player focused on ease of use.

The Juuke has a simplistic interface intended to be as easy to use as possible. Songs are selected using printed cards with embedded RFID tags – placing them on the Juuke triggers playback. Volume is controlled with a simple knob, and the only two buttons are for play/pause and shuffle mode.

Underneath, an Arduino Uno runs the show, hooked up to a RC522 RFID interface board. Music is handled by the DFPlayer mini, which loads tracks off a microSD card. The DFPlayer can be hooked up to a speaker directly, but there’s also a 3.5mm jack output if the device is to be used with an external amplifier.

It’s a tidy project, and one that actually looks pretty fun to use. Obviously, there’s some time investment required to prepare the SD card and produce the RFID cards, but the final product could be fun to use at a party, too. We’ve seen similar builds before, as well. Video after the break.

 

17 thoughts on “Easy-To-Use Music Player Relies On RFID

    1. Ours is a digital control, but with a rotary encoder fed knob. Doesn’t even have a button for start, just turn the time to desired time, stop and it turns on. Weird how digital control did 360 and came back as a mechanical rotary timer, per se.

    2. Or you just hit start and it runs for 30 seconds, hit start multiple times and it increments even while operating, then open the door and it stops, as all husbands know.

    1. “WAIT ONE GOL DARN MINUTE, LUKE”……Walter Brennan
      That is for all you infants to militant milineals out there. The old seniors out there were the ones that created the basic building radio and electronic components as well
      your synthetic materials for your Alphabet Blocks while you were in diapers, because we had wooden ones that people are now re-discovering today).
      I happen to be 64 years old and have retired from the military and another goverment
      service (nigh on to 20 years in each instance ( by the way, who made the foundation possible for this decades inception of the Space Force?).

      Now I will get off my soap box and ask you to define the “Elders” are???
      Yea, by the way, most Amatuer (HAM) Radio operators are Elder also…’just sayin’…

  1. When all you have is a 3D printer, everything looks like it needs a custom case.

    This would look way better in a Hammond enclosure, IMO. I do like the idea of using for parties, public settings or children/elders.

  2. Any prize for naming the artist now playing in the caption? I’m way old enough to be a lifelong fan. So its an easy question. But I wonder how many on HaD would know??

    Nice project, in any case.

  3. Very nice housing, looks amazing. I might build that one for us here.

    Surprisingly, the software seems to be a special one for this project. There is a very, very popular project for building a kids’ mp3 player named Tonuino. https://www.voss.earth/tonuino/ that uses the exact same hardware plus a build-in speaker and comes with a quite sophisticated software on github: https://github.com/xfjx/TonUINO It is popular enough that sellers from china are offering complete part sets on amazon for less than 15€.

    There is a gallery of different housings people build for their kids: https://discourse.voss.earth/t/tonuino-gehaeuse-galerie/786

    Maybe the author of this project is not aware of Tonuino because most descriptions are only in German?

  4. I have thought of something similar but instead of using RFID, I plan on using bar code reader to scan the bar code off a CD case. Of course, it is easy to print your own bar code for your own collection.

    1. Barcodes versus RFID — well, having used them each for some projects over the years, I gotta say that the price of barcodes is a matter of how much your time is worth. They have a lower barrier to entry on the creation side, but scanning them needs either a laser/led scanner or a camera and image processing code; RFID read/write modules are a few bucks, depending on the tags’ frequency, and are also built into most cellphones these days.
      It’s the handling that’s the problem, particularly in an application targeting children, the disabled, or the elderly; reading a barcode on an object requires _finding_ the barcode, aligning the thing with the scanner, and holding everything steady for long enough to register; good image processing can cut down on some problems, but that adds processing power requirements. Meanwhile, a tag just needs to be put near the reader to register, and the most meager microcontroller can handle talking to the modules.

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