Michelle

So we need a solution to fairly and easily play music in the Marketing Dep office here at DIYElectronics. No more complaints of only one type of music playing or a genre you don’t like. No more getting up to change music. No more switching of platforms back and forth. Meet Retro OctiPi! Our very own Raspberry Pi Music Server, complete with a custom 3D Printed retro cassette tape case. Retro Octi is a cloud-based music streaming server running an open-source python software called Mopidy. Mopidy is extensible and plays music from local disk, Spotify, SoundCloud, TuneIn, and more. You can edit the playlist from any phone, tablet, or computer using a variety of MPD and web clients. We followed the installation guide from Mopidy for Raspberry Pi and are using a Raspberry Pi 3B for this project. What you will need: Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 8 or 16GB SD Card. OR one of our Raspberry Pi Starter Kits Speaker system. 3D Printer or access to one. Step 1: Install an OS onto your SD card for the Raspberry Pi You need an 8GB or bigger SD card. (If you have an SD card preinstalled with ‘NOOBS’, you can skip this step.) I downloaded and used the Raspberry Pi Desktop Imager, it is much easier, but you can use whichever method you wish to install an OS Step 2: Connect and set up your Raspberry Pi The above link takes you through the basic setup of a Raspberry Pi. Step 3:Install Mopidy Follow the Mopidy docs to install Mopidy and whichever extensions you wish.I installed the following extensions: Soundcloud Spotify (only works with a premium account) Youtube Mopidy-file *Make sure to run as a service and not in the terminal There are various ways to use the Mopidy service and a lot of it depends on how you wish to use it. Step 4: Install a Frontend or Web Client I chose to use Iris as my frontend as it has support for most platforms I wanted to use. There are many options once again, choose whichever is most suited to your needs. Step 5: 3D Print a case for your Raspberry Pi There are many different Raspi cases for you to choose from! I wanted to go for a retro theme for this project, I could not find a cassette tape case STL online so my fellow work colleague, Tom, so kindly merged two existing STLs using Tinkercad to create a unique Cassette Tape Raspberry Pi Case (note this is for Raspi 3B only). I used Cura to slice my 3D Print and I printed it on the Creailty CR-20 I then proceeded to design and paint some retro art for my case. And there you have it, our very own music streaming server with Iris installed. Anyone in the office can play, add to queue, add to playlist from either Soundcloud, Spotify, Youtube, or Local Disk. Final thoughts: This was my first Raspberry Pi project, and it got complicated! But, all in all, I learnt a great deal and 6/10 would do it again. Let’s just say, I’m better at painting than programming. But in all seriousness, this was a great project, I’m impressed with the scale of all that Mopidy has to offer and I had a lot of fun making this. Looking forward to doing more projects with Raspberry Pi. If you would like to see a video of this project, check it out here.

Michelle

Neopixel LED Matrix Cube

Retro OctiPi Music Server with Mopidy