theonebuttonaudiobookplayer

This little Raspberry Pi based project is a gift for my wife’s grandmother for her 90th birthday. Being visually impaired, she is hard to entertain but loves to listen to audiobooks. The problem is, that she isn’t able to handle a ghetto blaster or MP3 player.

The solution to this problem was – tadaaaah – a one button audiobook player

It basically consists of:

• 1 Raspberry Pi
• 1 ModMyPi enclosure
• 1 button
• 2 resistors (330 Ohm, 10 Kilo-Ohm)
• 1 blue LED
• 1 (slow) 8GB SD-Card
• some wire
• a pair of speakers

The following software has been used:

• Raspbian minimal image (http://www.linuxsystems.it/2012/06/raspbian-wheezy-armhf-raspberry-pi-minimal-image)

• mpd (music player daemon)

• mpc

• mpd-python

• pyudev (for USB access)

• a self-written python script

  The features are the following:

• always on: When you power on the raspberry, it will boot up and start the python script with the audio book in pause

• one button usage: The button pauses and unpauses the audio book or goes back one track when you press the button longer than 4 seconds

• remembers position: It will always remember the last played position

• only one audiobook: There will always be only one audio book on the Raspberry

• easy audio book deployment: When you plug in a USB thumb drive with a special name/label, the Raspberry will stop playing, mount the thumb drive, deletes the old audio book, copies the new one, rebuilds the playlist and – after unplugging the thumb drive – starts the new audiobook in pause mode

• multi format: Since it uses mpd, the player supports Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, OggFLAC, MP2, MP3, MP4/AAC, MOD, Musepack and wave

If you like to build your own one button audio book player, here are the super simple schematics: http://blogs.fsfe.org/clemens/files/2012/10/obabp_schematics.jpg

You can read more about it on http://blogs.fsfe.org/clemens/2012/10/30/the-one-button-audiobook-player/