Yoda FMThis is Yoda FM. If you have already read any of my previous posts, you will no doubt have seen my Star Wars themed projects. You will probably also already know that the Pimoroni pHAT boards fit perfectly onto a Raspberry Pi and the Lego digital alarm clocks. This makes the clocks a perfect product for housing the Pimoroni Pirate Audio. Pimoroni describe their Pirate Audio as, “a range of all-in-one audio boards for Raspberry Pi, with high-quality digital audio, beautifully-crisp IPS displays for album art, tactile buttons for playback control, and our custom Pirate Audio software and installer to make setting it all up a breeze.”
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Building Yoda FM
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I had an old Lego Yoda alarm clock kicking around which was not being used so, I decided to convert it into a Star Wars themed music player. This was a simple project to put together, the build consisted of embedding the hardware inside Yoda and then setting up the software and access permission. I did not come across any major issues in the process. No FAILs. When you boot up Yoda FM a short Python program runs which triggers a famous Yoda saying, this lets you know that the Raspberry Pi is ready, and Yoda is ready to play you favourite music.
To start with I opened up Yoda (using the Force) and removed the old digital alarm clock which I have kept and will probably use in another hack. Then I Dremeled away some of the internal plastics to securely house the Pi Zero and Pirate Audio pHAT neatly into the space. I then used the Dremel to make two holes in the legs which house the speaker wires, which run through the legs into the box on which Yoda stands.
I drilled two larger holes onto the box lid, about 2.5cm in diameter to house the speakers and you Sugra to attach and hold each speaker in place on the wooden lid. Big thanks to James Turner who completed the wonderful artwork and painted this impressive landscape of Dagobah bringing an old boring wooden box to life.
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SoftwareThe music is controlled by Mopidy which is Powered by Python And described as “an extensible music server, Mopidy plays music from local disk, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Play Music, and more.” It is really easy to use and setup and enables you to access Yoda FM from a web page either on your phone, tablet or laptop or other device and select the songs to play. You can also choose a playlist add new songs and increase or decrease the volume. Mopidy also has a built-in function to access Spotify premium accounts which then allows you to access your Spotify playlists and music and all the common associated features. One neat feature is that the album art from your playlist is displayed on the small IPS display on the physical Pirate Audio board.
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