Smartphones have largely replaced portable media players like the iPod Classic for most folks. But sometimes you want a device that just holds a huge amount of music and which can play for hours and hours… and if the battery dies it won’t stop you from taking calls on your phone.

While a handful of companies offer expensive HiFi music players, and dirt cheap MP3 players are a dime a dozen (or a little over a dozen dimes), sometimes it can be hard to find exactly what you want… so you build your own.

Or at least, that’s what the developer of the PiPod did. If you want to follow in his footsteps, you can take a shortcut and buy some of the basic components needed to make your own PiPod for $100 (including shipping).

Here’s what you get for $75: a printed circuit board with an attached 2.2 inch, 320 x 240 pixel display and a PCM5102A 24-bit digital audio converter with 3.5mm headphone jack.

This is still a DIY device, because you’ll need to supply your SD card for storage, battery (1,200 mAh or 2,000 mAh), and 3D printed case… oh, and you’ll also need a Raspberry Pi Zero in order to power the whole thing.

The PiPod uses the $5 single-board computer to run Linux-based software including VLC (which handles media playback) and a custom user interface to display song titles, artist names, and album titles, song length, and other details.

Source code is available if you want to modify the software or hardware designs, and you can read more about the PiPod at the project’s Hackaday page, where you’ll also find the latest software image plus links to files that will let you 3D print a custom docking station for the PiPod.

via Raspberry Pi

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