RFID Jukebox For The Kids

March 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Dominik] built a fun musical toy for his daughter [Anna]. It’s a jukebox that lets her play her favorite tunes using RFID tags to select between them.

The project is simple, yet robust. The enclosure is a wooden craft box that you can pick up for a couple of bucks. Inside there’s an Arduino with a Wave Shield which handles the audio playback. An RFID reader takes input from the set of card-tags he procured. An internal Lithium battery powers the device, with a USB port for charging.

Sure, those guts have some cost involved in them. But there’s no LCD which can be broken, and we thing the boards will hold up well to abuse if mounted correctly. Plus there’s a lot of future potential here. When we saw the cards we thought of those toys which make the animal sounds (“what does the cow say… mooo”). This could be used for that with really young children. Then repurposed into this jukebox as they get a bit older. If you put the guts in a new enclosure it will appear to be a brand-new toy, right?

See a demo of the project in the clip after the break.

Continue reading “RFID Jukebox For The Kids” →

Broken Vintage Record Player Reborn As A Portable MP3 Cabinet

September 7, 2011 by Mike Nathan 23 Comments

old_record_player_pc_jukebox

[Julian] picked up an old record player that was sitting in somebody’s trash pile, and brought it home to see if it could be restored to working order. When he got it home he discovered that it didn’t work at all, so he and his wife decided to modernize it a bit.

In an effort to simultaneously reunite himself with his music collection and piss off audiophiles/antique collectors in the process, he gutted the radio and began rebuilding it to serve as an MP3 jukebox. Once the innards were removed, his wife refinished the cabinet and gave the front grill a new cloth cover.

An old PC was installed inside the cabinet, along with a set of relatively cheap (but better than paper cone) speakers. A pair of custom cut plexi panels were used to cover the computer, while providing space for the monitor and Apple wireless keyboard + trackpad [Julian] uses to manage the jukebox.

The refurbed record player came out looking quite nice, and although it likely raises the ire of several different groups of purists, we think it’s pretty cool.

Restoring A Jukebox With An Arduino

August 17, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

[Jim] just finished restoring an old Seeburg USC1 jukebox for his father using an Arduino, replacing an electromechanical rats nest of wires. The stack of 45 records were replaced with an Arduino Mega 2560 with an Sparkfun MP3 player shield, and he jukebox lights are now controlled with 74595 shift registers. Because his jukebox isn’t taking in money, the dollar bill validator has been modified into a ‘skip song’ button, and when there are no songs in the jukebox queue, there are 500 additional songs on the SD card that will randomly play.

We’ve seen one of [Jim]’s builds before. Earlier this year he repaired a thirty year old Pachinko machine using the same Arduino + MP3 shield setup. It looks like [Jim] is pretty skilled at revitalizing bulky old electronics. The jukebox restoration is great and has a lot more class than the internet-connected touch screen monstrosities that we still pump money into.

Check out the video after the break for a walk through of this restoration.

Continue reading “Restoring A Jukebox With An Arduino” →

Touch Screen Jukebox

January 28, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 5 Comments

We went “live” with our forums less than 24 hours ago and we already have our first project ready for the front page. [Elementix] has shown us his touch screen jukebox build. Using an assortment of car audio speakers and amplifiers hooked up to an old Pentium 4 PC with 120 Gigs of storage, he put together the base cabinet. The touchscreen is an ebay find and he built a custom enclosure for that part. For the interface, he started with “Jukebox Arcade”, a jukebox front end for mame cabinets but found he could easily manipulate the layout since it used an xml file for the settings. After some trial and error, and a little work with the gimp, he got it looking the way he wanted. If you haven’t been there already, you should really check out our new forums.

Antique Jukebox Audio Streamer

February 5, 2010 by James Munns 11 Comments

Reader [Jimmy] sent us some info about his recently completed antique radio to audio streamer conversion. The electronics from the original radio were too far gone to repair, but he took the time to pull apart modern components to provide a polished looking finished project without losing the antique feel. We like it, but we are just suckers for that old time look. Check out his blog for more photos.