this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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I have a completed project up on my Tindie page in my profile, it's an ESP32 based input/output control board powered by PoE that was designed for ESPHome software.
Lately I've been working on a fully featured modern MP3 player with tiny OLED screen and a PCB the size of a credit card. I've been frustrated with every project on the web that has anything to do with playing MP3s, they all kinda suck and most don't go beyond the "hello world" equivalent of playing an MP3 file. So I'm making sort of a "core" base firmware that will include all the basics, like browsing for a file to play, creating/editing playlists, non-blocking interrupt driven playback, internet streaming, and an alarm clock. Others would then be able to extend the functionally of this core system by just directly using its documented libraries and classes. It's all based around an ESP8266 and the VS1053 decoder chip.
As a layman, I don't understand most of what you just said but it sounds like it's a small, cheap, elegant mp3 player for the modern time and that's surprisingly exciting. As enshittification spreads more and more, I wouldn't be surprised to see an upcoming exodus from music streaming subscription platforms and a return to a napster-like boom of music piracy as we collectively realize that we really only like listening to like 200 songs anymore anyway, and storage is absurdly cheap compared to 20ish years ago.
What is the best pitch for why somebody should use your device over the phones most of us have within reach? My hunch is that it's related to privacy or maybe for kids whose parents won't let them have a phone? Or is this purely a personal project that you're not looking to monetize?
It's just something for people to tinker with and modify if they wish, and learn from. Kinda like Arduino microcontroller kits. My goal isn't to produce the next iPod. My goal is to open up the iPod and let anyone build one.
That's really cool! My knowledge and experience only goes about as far as building a desktop PC. I'm playing with duplo blocks and you're over there figuratively the director of R&D at Lego. Best of luck!