Hobbyist assembles wooden Spotify box for streaming music

A hobbyist has made his own Spotify box, a wooden box containing a small computer, with which music can be streamed to an audio system at home via the Spotify app and a self-developed app to use the phone as a remote control.

With the stereo RCA connection, the box can be connected to a (pre)amplifier or mixer to let music from Spotify reverberate through the house, says the maker, Evan Hailey, in a blog post. With the Spotify app and via a specially made app from Hailey, you can then connect to the box via the home WiFi network in order to use the phone as a remote control. A connection via Ethernet is also possible, according to the maker.

The wooden Spotify box contains an Allwinner V3S soc with a 1.2GHz Arm Cortex-A7 processor and 64MB DDR2 ram. The 92dB audio codex has a stereo dac to produce sound with. There is also a 10/100Mbit Ethernet phy and two SD/mmc controllers are present. According to Hailey, the combination of the little bit of internal dram and the ability to produce stereo audio makes this Spotify box the perfect low-budget music streaming client.

Hailey started the project by designing his own pcb and building a soc on it, with a mountain of ports, wifi and bluetooth. He then wrote software that enabled him to make the board work and give it various functions, including the ability to scan for Bluetooth devices on the network. Finally, he wrote an app to use his phone as a remote control. The first version of the box was 3d printed, but Hailey didn’t think it looked good. He then decided to process the PCB into a block of wood.

Hailey could have achieved a similar result much more easily by just using a Raspberry Pi or Chromecast Audio, but according to the maker, it was more about the learning process. “I’ve learned more about Linux, debugging and writing software through the hundreds of hours I’ve put into this.” Hailey says he’ll probably make an improved version in the future, but will take a break from it for now. project.