Volumio based radio with NFC

Overview Volumio based internet radio, controlled by NFC, built in an old speaker.

Background Inspired by the extreemly good looking Spotify Box and QR based systems like Audiosphere, I wanted to make something similar for my kids. I’ve earlier built a few radios based on small, cheap bluetooth speakers like music angel, but wanted something with better sound this time.

Prototype QR are fast and cheap, so I made a quick prototype. It turned out they are unreliable when there’s no display to give feedback on how the camera sees them. Both lighting and focus was a problem. Next up, NFC. I decided on a PN532 NFC reader, simply because I had one around. They’re about $8 / 70 NOK on ebay. It communicates via i2c, and there’s a python library for it. I decided to make it easy for myself and allow for any kind of NFC tag I could get hold of, so the plan was to read and use what ever data or ID the tags contain, and make a list to match IDs and URLs.

Volumio Volumio is a general music player for small devices like the Pi. Due to Mopidy it supports playing music from lots of sources. The two I’m interessted in are internet radios and Spotify, but this will work for anything Mopidy can play. Volumio also has plugins for other stuff, like mono output, being a Spotify Connect speaker and button controls connected via GPIO like I will use here.