The One Button Audiobook Player

This little Raspberry Pi based project is a gift for my wife’s grandmother for her 90th birthday. Being visually impaired, she is hard to entertain but loves to listen to audiobooks. The problem is, that she isn’t able to handle a ghetto blaster or MP3 player.

The solution to this problem was – tadaaaah – a one button audiobook player

It basically consists of:

1 Raspberry Pi
1 ModMyPi enclosure
1 button
2 resistors (330 Ohm, 10 Kilo-Ohm)
1 blue LED
1 (slow) 8GB SD-Card
some wire
a pair of speakers

The following software has been used:

Raspbian minimal image (http://www.linuxsystems.it/2012/06/raspbian-wheezy-armhf-raspberry-pi-minimal-image)
mpd (music player daemon)
mpc
mpd-python
pyudev (for USB access)
a self-written python script

The features are the following:

always on: When you power on the raspberry, it will boot up and start the python script with the audio book in pause
one button usage: The button pauses and unpauses the audio book or goes back one track when you press the button longer than 4 seconds
remembers position: It will always remember the last played position
only one audiobook: There will always be only one audio book on the Raspberry
easy audio book deployment: When you plug in a USB thumb drive with a special name/label, the Raspberry will stop playing, mount the thumb drive, deletes the old audio book, copies the new one, rebuilds the playlist and – after unplugging the thumb drive – starts the new audiobook in pause mode
multi format: Since it uses mpd, the player supports Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, OggFLAC, MP2, MP3, MP4/AAC, MOD, Musepack and wave

Some pics and a video:

(The audiobook used in this video is a free version of Cory Doctorows “Little Brother” from Fabian Neidhardt)

If you like to build your own one button audio book player, here are the super simple schematics:

And last but not least – the python script. The code might be crappy, please comment if you have improvements (especially regarding loadMusic). You can find it on github:

https://github.com/exitnode/theonebuttonaudiobookplayer

63 thoughts on “The One Button Audiobook Player”

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Hi,
Very Nice Project !!
What did you use to fix the blue led on the case ?
I ‘ve drilled a hole in top of case but, what did you use for fixing the led .
I’m trying to do the same project for my sister, I’d appreciate your help.

Thanks a lot,
By the way : Great job !

Thank you very much Ludo!

I used something like this which I bought at the local electronics store: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41-Inwyo3GL.jpg

Michael

Very Nice! I plan on emulating this design over the next few weeks (will keep you posted). Has anyone else successfully used your designs to build one that you know of?

I love it! But btw, where can I buy the same case?? It looks so nice

Thank you! You can buy the case at modmypi.com

Great project. I’ve stolen huge chunks of it to make a similar thing that has a cron job to run get-iplayer with a list of programmes that my son likes so he can have it as a bedtime player (OK I could have done all that with an MP3 player but where wouIld have been the fun in that). Holding down the button skips forward rather than back in my version. Thank you very much for shaing your work.

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