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The resulting “sPot” has both WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, allowing it to connect to both speakers and wireless headphones, in addition to a color display and a 1000 mAh battery. If you are an audio purist, you will hate this next part: The headphone jack on the top of the device is for show and does not work. At the heart of the device is the $ 10 Raspberry Pi Zero W. There’s also a motor that creates haptic feedback when using the click wheel. To charge the device, there is a micro-USB port. While we would have preferred a USB-C connection, Micro-USB is definitely an improvement over Apple’s 30-pin connector (remember that?).
In total, all of the components cost him less than $ 100. At $ 40, the most expensive part was the color screen that Dupont used to replace the original iPod display (the 4th gen model was the last to ship with a monochromatic display). Part of the reason it was so expensive was that most manufacturers no longer make displays this small since even the smallest smartphone screen is larger than anything that comes with a click wheel iPod. The fact that the device works so well is due to a little luck. Dupont found a ten-year-old Hackaday article that details how one of the connectors inside the iPod works. This allowed him to play the Click Wheel with all the other components.
The programming that powers the sPot is a mix of software that Dupont wrote himself and an application called Raspotify, which allows a Raspberry Pi computer to access the streaming service through the Spotify Connect API. The front-end interface it coded even allows the sPot to search for songs – although, as you can imagine, without a touchscreen keyboard it can take a while to type even a few characters.
If you have an old, unused iPod in a drawer somewhere and want to take care of the project yourself, Dupont has uploaded a detailed preview to Hackaday. He’s also uploading the software he wrote for the project to GitHub.
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