Chris Campbell’s qrocodile uses a Raspberry Pi, a camera, and QR codes to allow Chris’s children to take full control of the Sonos home sound system. And we love it!
qrocodile
Introducing qrocodile, a kid-friendly system for controlling your Sonos with QR codes. Source code is available at: https://github.com/chrispcampbell/qrocodile Learn more at: http://labonnesoupe.org https://twitter.com/chrscmpbll
- Werbung -- Werbung -
Sonos
SONOS is SONOS backwards. It’s also SONOS upside down, and SONOS upside down and backwards. I just learnt that this means SONOS is an ambigram. Hurray for learning!
Sonos (the product, not the ambigram) is a multi-room speaker system controlled by an app. Speakers in different rooms can play different tracks or join forces to play one track for a smooth musical atmosphere throughout your home.
If you have a Sonos system in your home, I would highly recommend accessing to it from outside your home and set it to play the Imperial March as you walk through the front door. Why wouldn’t you?
qrocodile
One day, Chris’s young children wanted to play an album while eating dinner. By this one request, he was inspired to create qrocodile, a musical jukebox enabling his children to control the songs Sonos plays, and where it plays them, via QR codes.
It all started one night at the dinner table over winter break. The kids wanted to put an album on the turntable (hooked up to the line-in on a Sonos PLAY:5 in the dining room). They’re perfectly capable of putting vinyl on the turntable all by themselves, but using the Sonos app to switch over to play from the line-in is a different story.
The QR codes represent commands (such as Play in the living room, Use the turntable, or Build a song list) and artists (such as my current musical crush Courtney Barnett or the Ramones).
A camera attached to a Raspberry Pi 3 feeds the Pi the QR code that’s presented, and the Pi runs a script that recognises the code and sends instructions to Sonos accordingly.
Chris used a costum version of the Sonos HTTP API created by Jimmy Shimizu to gain access to Sonos from his Raspberry Pi. To build the QR codes, he wrote a script that utilises the Spotify API via the Spotipy library.
His children are now able to present recognisable album art to the camera in order to play their desired track.
It’s been interesting seeing the kids putting the thing through its paces during their frequent “dance parties”, queuing up their favorite songs and uncovering new ones. I really like that they can use tangible objects to discover music in much the same way I did when I was their age, looking through my parents records, seeing which ones had interesting artwork or reading the song titles on the back, listening and exploring.
Chris has provided all the scripts for the project, along with a tutorial of how to set it up, on his GitHub — have a look if you want to recreate it or learn more about his code. Also check out Chris’ website for more on qrocodile and to see some of his other creations.
Website: LINK
