Mini Record Player is Actually a Spotify Streaming Device

A small record player has stepped into the 21st century, collaborating with Spotify in an unexpected way. The mastermind behind this project, AKZ Dev, has managed to breathe fresh life into a novelty coaster set built like a little turntable, combining old-school elegance with modern audio streaming. They’re designed to look like real records, complete with printed labels and all.

AKZ Dev managed to turn these coasters into a real record player by installing a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which serves as the operation’s main processing unit, monitoring what’s going on and managing the Spotify connection. Then they hid an RC522 RFID reader beneath the dish, which just reads the coasters. Each coaster receives an RFID tag on the back. When someone puts a record on the turntable, the reader takes up the tag’s unique ID, which corresponds to a specific piece of music on Spotify, such as a full album, a playlist, an artist’s entire back catalogue, or just one single track.

You can move the tonearm around by hand, just like on a standard player. There’s a small magnet attached to the arm, and a Hall effect sensor (the A3144 type) is close. When the arm swings over the record, the sensor registers the magnet’s location. That instructs the Pi to begin work, and the real playback begins with a stepper motor (28BYJ-48) connected via a ULN2003 driver board. The motor gently spins the platter, providing the visual signal of a record moving around. The music then begins to stream through whichever device is selected on the account, which is often an Echo Show with album art and track information displayed on its screen.

The final piece of the puzzle is the software, written in Python by AKZ Dev and available on GitHub under the RFID-Record-Player project. To get started, simply flash the Raspberry Pi OS, install all of the required dependencies, create a Spotify developer app to gain API access, and map all RFID IDs to Spotify URIs. Simply scan the tag on the coaster once to assign it, and then save the pairings in a simple JSON file. After that, the system runs by itself.

Putting all of the parts together needed some custom work, but the end product is a 3D-printed enclosure created in FreeCAD and produced on an Elegoo Saturn. The enclosure features adequate ventilation, a speaker grille area for those who choose to add one, and even coaster stand supports. You drill some holes for the platter shaft, tidy up the cables, and hide all of the components for a neat appearance. Prior to that, AKZ Dev conducted extensive prototyping on a breadboard, experimenting with various tweaks along the road.

When you lift the tonearm, it stops the music, just as dropping the needle used to start it. The platter simply stops abruptly, creating a distinct on-off sense without any confusing screens or buttons in the way. If you have other Spotify devices connected to the same account, they will happily pick up the stream, allowing the music to be played through a better speaker while the little player handles the technical portions.
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