This Old iPod Now Has Spotify Streaming Thanks to a Raspberry Pi Upgrade

This is hard to hear for those of us who remember the launch, but this October will mark the Apple iPod’s 20th birthday. While the iPod wasn’t the first portable music player with built-in storage, it was far better than anything else on the market at the time. Even the original base model had 5GB of storage, which seemed limitless then. The iPod also had a phenomenal user interface, which was improved even further with the addition of the iconic Click Wheel in the 4th generation (adopted from the iPod Mini). But streaming wasn’t possible until later models integrated iPhone features, which is why Guy Dupont modded a 4th gen iPod with a Raspberry Pi to stream Spotify music.

If you actually own your entire library of music, then you would probably be content to simply store it on your iPod’s hard drive and wouldn’t have any use for streaming services. But that is an exceedingly rare situation these days, because it is more economical to pay a modest monthly fee to gain access to all of the music in world through services like Spotify. Dupont wanted to take advantage of that convenience, but wanted the great hardware and user interface of the iPod, too. Namely, he wanted to keep that sweet, sweet Click Wheel that we all loved so much. To achieve that, he replaced all of the iPod’s hardware. The only exceptions were the Click Wheel and the enclosure itself.

That hardware was replaced with a Raspberry Pi Zero W equipped with a 32GB SD card, a 2” Adafruit NTSC/PAL TFT screen, a FPC breakout, a small vibration motor, an Adafruit PowerBoost 1000 Basic, an Adafruit Mini charger, and a 1000mAh lithium-ion battery cell. Dupont coded his own iPod-style Python interface using tkinter, which used Raspotify to connect to the Spotify API in order to stream music. The Click Wheel has an FPC cable and a FPC breakout board was used to connect that cable to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins for control. Composite video is output to the 2” display, which simplified the connection compared to HDMI. Audio is output through the Raspberry Pi’s built-in Bluetooth connection to either speakers or headphones. The vibration motor provides subtle haptic feedback when scrolling on the Click Wheel, just like the original did. Other than the screen being very slightly too short, it is nearly impossible to tell that the iPod was modded. But Dupont can now use it to stream any music through Spotify.