rpi-nfc-player

Tiger player

This is control software for the awesome not-useless-anymore box, that is decked out to be able to control a Sonos speaker system using NFC cards.

The main motivation for making this was to allow my kids to easily choose themselves what music to play on the Sonos speaker we have set up in their room, and when. I didn't want to just let them loose on a tablet/phone with the full Deezer catalogue at this point, and I also wanted something that was more fun and easy to use. Enter the Tiger player.

Hardware used

• Raspberry Pi Zero W
• RC522 RFID reader
• "Useless box"
• Two generic colorful push buttons
• A bunch of cheap MIFARE Ultralight C cards
• RGB LED
• Sonos speaker

And then of course wire, glue, and the equipment/supplies needed for soldering all of this together.

How does it work?

The RFID reader is glued to the underside of the lid of the box. The range of NFC is not great, but it does make it through the thin wooden lid of the box. Whenever one of the NFC cards is put on top of the lid, the reader picks up the ID and uses it to fetch the corresponding playlist from a BuntDB database. The playlist is then submitted over UPnP to the Sonos speaker which starts playing the song(s). The two buttons on the front can be used to skip to the next or previous tracks. When the card is removed from the lid, the playback on the Sonos speaker is stopped.

Building the code

To cross compile the go code to be run on the Raspberry Pi Zero W, issue:

$ GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm GOARM=5 go build -tags=pi

To build a cut down version that removes the hardware requirements on running on a Raspberry Pi with the RFID reader, the binary can also be built witout build tags. This will generate some dummy button events, and log interactions with the tiger and LED. Interaction with the sonos speaker is intact.

$ go build

Usage

usage: rpi-nfc-player [<flags>] <command> [<args> ...]

Music player that plays Deezer albums on a Sonos speaker with the help of NFC cards, a Raspberry Pi and
some buttons.

Flags:
  --help   Show context-sensitive help (also try --help-long and --help-man).
  --debug  Turn on debug logging.

Commands:
  help [<command>...]
    Show help.

  start --speaker=SPEAKER
    Start the music player and start listening for NFC cards.

  check
    Check all album/playlist entries and show problems.

  add [<flags>]
    Construct and add a new playlist to a card.

  remove [<flags>]
    Remove a card from the database.

  dump [<flags>]
    Read a card and dump all the available information onto standard out.

  search <query>
    Search for albums on deezer

  label [<flags>]
    Create a label for a card.

start, and the variants of add, dump, and label where a cardId is not manually specified, must be run on the Raspberry to work. The other can be run on any machine that can execute the go binary (and has an internet connection).

Contributing

If you feel like contributing with bug fixes or feature additions, PRs are welcome 😋.

Credits

To be able to put all of this together, I've relied on many many search results from duckduckgo, but most importantly the following:

• Craig Duncan for his Sonos PHP library. Without this one I would either have spent an eternity trying to figure out the Sonos control, or then just plain given up.
• jdevelop's port of the Python RC522 library. This functioned as the base for getting the RFID reader to work with the Ultralight cards.
• The frames for the card labels were downloaded from Vecteezy.com