Jukebox with GPIO Buttons

Simple jukebox with Raspberry Pi.

Background

My 3 y.o. kid likes to listen to music, but I couldn't find music player with easy enough UI for her to operate by herself. Interestingly there is no plug-and-play projects/solution to this. So, following the DIYer mantra:

How hard can it be?

How It Works

User's parent provides audio files (mp3) in a default location. The files will be mapped to each button wired to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO input. Button press will trigger play/stop of the audio file.

Disclaimer

This is a home project, code is shit.

Requirements

• sudo apt install gpiozero python3-vlc vlc-bin vlc-plugin-base python3-rpi.gpio
• ALSA volume defaults to 50%, crank it up with alsamixer. This is persistent.

Tested on

• Raspberry Pi 1 (2011).
• Raspbian v10 (Buster) (cat /etc/os-release)
• python3-vlc v3.0.4106

Hardware and Wiring

1. Get a Raspberry Pi
2. Get a speaker/speaker system that works with Raspberry Pi, and test audio playback with e.g. omxplayer
3. Get push buttons with LEDs and wire them properly with resistors
4. Use gpio readall and pinout to find out pin numbering (see "Useful Development Tools" below)
5. Configure the BCM pin numbering for the buttons and LEDs(from gpio readall) in config file $HOME/.config/pi_jukebox/pi_jukebox.conf (file created after first run)

Here's how the internal looks like on my setup:

Bottom right is a USB-powered speaker. TODO: cable management

TODO: Draw up wiring diagram

Installation

pip3 install git+ssh://git@gitlab.com/bagong/pi_jukebox#egg=pi_jukebox

Run pi_jukebox to populate initial settings.

Usage

• Put mp3 files into to default location: $HOME/pi_jukebox/
• Music location is configurable in $HOME/.config/pi_jukebox/pi_jukebox.conf
• Start jukebox:

pi_jukebox

• or make it autostart with adding this entry to /etc/rc.local before exit 0

su pi -lc "pi_jukebox > /dev/null 2>&1"

Notes

• For some reason gpiozero's when_pressed() doesn't register button press properly, events are often missed. Older RPi.GPIO (v0.7) works much better and reliable.

References

• https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/94207

Useful Development Tools

• pinout command from gpiozero package
• gpio readall from wiringpi package, to get GPIO readings. Call with watch -n 0.1 gpio readall to do 10Hz polling read.