Co-author Sean McManus told me: “We wanted to finish the book by highlighting some inspiring projects that would give people an idea of what they could do by taking their new programming and electronics skills further. The one-button audiobook player is a nice example of an electronics project, but I particularly like the way it’s really improving someone’s quality of life, by making it possible for your wife’s grandmother to listen to audiobooks. I get a lot of enjoyment from audiobooks myself, so I can imagine how much it means to her to be able to listen to them, especially given her visual impairment.”

Other inspiring Raspberry Pi projects mentioned in the book include a synthesiser, a bird feeder webcam, a weather station and a jukebox.

You can find out more about Raspberry Pi For Dummies at Sean’s website.

It’s built out of:

• aluminium tubes
• brass sticks
• wooden shoes and gloves
• lots of two-component adhesive
• a 12V 40W bulb with E27 thread
• some wire
• a AC/DC converter 12V 3A

In order to archive it for myself, I’ve set up a github repository where the source code is available: https://github.com/exitnode/adressenmeister

Here’s a little screen-cap of it:

Update:
Here’s a pic of the floppy disk:

And yes, it’s a IBM Model M 122-key Keyboard

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