This Raspberry Pi Boombox Plays RFID Cassette Tapes

Cassette tapes — particularly the Compact Cassette standard developed by Philips in the early ‘60s — were a major improvement over vinyl records and reel-to-reel tapes, at least when it came to convenience. Sound quality is a different matter, but cassette tapes could eventually hold about 45 minutes of audio per side while a vinyl record could hold less than 30 minutes. Cassette tapes are also much more compact and aren’t prone to skipping, which was ideal for listening on the go. That’s why they were popular for car stereos and portable stereos. But they’re still outdated, which is why Redditor Kokem converted a vintage boombox with a Raspberry Pi to play RFID cassette tapes.

While the 45 minutes of audio per side on a cassette was certainly better than vinyl records could offer, that capacity is laughable today. An MP3 player the same size as a cassette tape can easily hold thousands of hours of music, while a small smartphone or WiFi-connected iPod can access virtually all of the music in the world through a service like Spotify. But it’s still fun to insert a cassette tape, which is what makes Kokem’s boombox so cool. They can pop in a cassette tape just like with any other boombox, but those cassette tapes contain RFID tags that can be used to play any artist, album, genre, or playlist through either Spotify or SoundCloud. It’s the perfect mix of new and old technology, and we can only imagine how satisfying it is to play albums with this boombox.

The project required that Kokem ditch pretty much all of the boombox’s original electronic components. Those were replaced with a Raspberry Pi, an RFID reader module, and a rechargeable battery pack. It isn’t clear if Kokem is using the original amplifier and speakers, or if those were replaced, too. A small RFID tag is attached to each cassette tape. When the tape is placed into the boombox and the play button is pressed, the tag is read and the data on that tag is used to queue up a specific album or playlist on either Spotify or SoundCloud. That is then played through the Raspberry Pi and output through the speakers. Phoniebox is used to handle all of the nitty gritty software details of reading the RFID tags and playing the music. We can’t think of a better use for a vintage boombox that would otherwise collect dust on a thrift store shelf.