It all started with an advertisement on a famous social network about an old radio and vinyl player whose destiny was to finish to the trash. Back in time, I was working on a smart speaker with an e-ink screen based on raspberry pi and I directly thought that this old radio would be perfect to make this project a reality.

Without hesitation, I contacted the owner and a few days later I had this dusty radio at home. My main plan was to put my smart speaker system to replace the radio and connect it to the already existing speaker.

The first step is to open up everything and get rid of the stuff I won’t need. It may hurt all the old electronic lovers and it did hurt me too to destroy this radio since it was still working., but it is not my thing to listen to the only noisy AM Italian radio channel I found.

Time to open this old radio and remove its electronic. With the help of a sharp razor blade, I removed the paint on the glass to have some space to put my e-ink display. I chose a 5.83 e-ink by waveshare with 3 colors: black, white, and red. More info about the display here.

With that done, I removed the old mechanical buttons of the radio to put a cheap amplifier found on amazon. My goal here is not to make a high quality audio system but to make a nice looking furniture that can stream some audio with Spotify for example. When adding this little amp, I had to cut down the bottom plastic piece that was holding the button and yeah, I messed up the cut… But having a 3d printer, after a few measurements, I 3d-printed the pieces directly the right size and they fit perfectly around the buttons.

To make the system a bit more interactive, I added some neopixel rings that act like vumeters. Some nice 3d printed pieces hold them well to the whole system. With all the electronic wired up, it was time to print everything.

With all that done, it was time to sand all the wooden parts of the radio and pass some paint on it. I decided to go for a black finish and to let some parts all natural giving a nice industrial look to it. I also cleaned and painted all the buttons in black and red to fit the e-ink display colors. Here we are with the final result!

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For more details on the software part, everything is documented on my GitHub, you just have to follow this link. As a quick resume, I added mopidy and librespot to have Spotify access. With the mopidy api I retrieve the album artwork and process a k-mean clustering to decompose it in 3 colors for the e-ink display. With a loopback audio card made with pulseaudio, I do a fft of the actual music playing and display it on the neopixels ring. Finally, everything is customizable and can be easily modified with a properties file.