Vintage Radio Plex Server
By Andrew Gregory. Posted
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Not to sound like a bunch of old people, but we really do believe that lots of things were better in the olden days. Industrial design reached incredible heights with the Bauhaus, the Wiener Werkstätte, and the beautiful, form-follows-function designs of Dieter Rams for Braun in the 1950s and 1960s. We’ve lost a lot of the craft that goes into product design – most galling of all, we’re losing tactile, clicky buttons, as designers force touchscreens on us. But if you can get hold of a piece of hardware from the 1980s or 1990s, and incorporate some of the original controls into a new project, you’re 90% of the way towards creating something beautiful and unique.
In that spirit we applaud maker and Reddit user zef37, who has taken a vintage radio and turned it into a modern streaming/audio speaker with the aid of a Raspberry Pi 4.
Along with our single-board computer, there’s a PCM5122 digital audio converter, TPA3116D2 DC12-26V 2×120W audio amplifier, a pair of three-inch 4 ohm 20W speakers, a 1602 16×2 LCD, and a really, really bright ultraviolet 5V LED strip for bezel lighting. These do seem like oddly specific parts to us, but if that’s what you’ve got to hand, that’s what you use – and the digital audio converter chip used is the same model found on the Raspberry Pi DAC Pro (and on similar products from Adafruit et al), so if you want to build something similar, the hardware is available to you.
The original internals were damaged beyond repair, but they did manage to keep the front panel knobs as potentiometers for the LCD backlight, volume, and Bluetooth/Plex server mode change, as well as the original rocker control for the power on/off switch.
Features Editor Andrew trawls the internet for Cool Stuff while keeping the magazine running smoothly.
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