Akasaka Ryuunosuke's ESPer CDP Is an Espressif ESP32-Powered Smart CD Player for the 21st Century
"[This] is how a CD player would look like if it was made in 2025," its creator says of the project, built largely from salvaged parts.
Maker and physical media fan Akasaka Ryuunosuke has designed a smart CD player powered by an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller — bringing modern features like Bluetooth audio, song tracking, lyrics display, and internet radio support to the classic format: the ESPer CDP.
"What we have here is a bog-standard ESP32-WROVER," Ryuunosuke says of the microcontroller powering the project, which is a celebration of physical media with a modern twist. "It shows the logo for a few seconds while it connects to the Wi-Fi [network] and does all the initialization stuff, and [then loads] the CD mode."
Ryuunosuke's creation is almost exclusively made from scavenged parts, the microcontroller notwithstanding: the CD drive itself is an IDE-format PC DVD drive designed for desktop computers, the screen is a vacuum-fluorescent display (VFD) salvaged from an old arcade machine, and even the infrared remote control was designed for use with Sony's PlayStation 2, launched back in the year 2000.
At its most basic, the CD player plays CDs — as you'd expect. Ryuunosuke has crammed a lot more functionality than that into the build, though: it can scan a CD and retrieve a track listing from an online CD database, download lyrics that display in time with the music for a basic karaoke mode, and can even upload played songs to Last.fm — known as "scrobbling." Other features include internet radio streaming and the ability to receive Bluetooth streamed audio complete with song title and artist data.
"[This] is how a CD player would look like if it was made in 2025," Ryuunosuke says of the build. "Future plans: hopefully a case, hopefully something else like HTTP firmware updates and whatnot. I'm going to build at least five of these, because that was the minimal order for the PCBs, so drop me a line if you want to buy one."
Full project details, board schematics, and firmware source code are available on GitHub under an unspecified license; additional information is available on the project's Hackaday.io page.