CD Player Disguised as Speaker Base
Craving some old-school tunes with your modern tech setup? Meet [Chad Boughton], who built a sleek CD player that seamlessly connects to his fancy Klipsch speaker, all via a Raspberry Pi.
The hardware hunt started with procuring an external CD drive - no ordinary drive, but one that holes up in an external laptop-style enclosure. But the speaker wasn’t privy to such antiquated methods. So, in came the Raspberry Pi to act as the intermediary when [Chad] decided to evict the USB and Ethernet ports, a modification we’ve seen before. Now, with the USB ports necessitated, [Chad] simply soldered the CD drive and speaker cables directly to the Pi.
Plugged into the Raspberry Pi, the speaker somehow transformed into a USB audio device. Of course, the software side was the next stop. [Chad] enlisted VLC to play the CDs, but he needed a remote control for the whole shebang. Thanks to an IR receiver hooked up to the Pi's GPIO pins, it could decode the signals from the speaker's original remote and relay them to VLC. The end result is a remarkably integrated system that could fool you into thinking it's a stock upgrade module at first glance.
The CD might have recently turned 40, but it shows no signs of fading away anytime soon. Manufacturers might lose interest, but as long as we're yearning to play our ancient discs, [Chad] and other inventive folk will have our backs.
Given Chad's modified CD player setup, he integrated an Arduino to control the playback of CDs with VLC, enhancing the functionality of his Raspberry Pi-based system. Additionally, instead of relying on the speaker's original remote, he connected an IR receiver to the Pi's GPIO pins to decode the signals from the remote and relay them to the VLC software, making his CD player a symphony of modern technology and vintage gadgets.
