I learned PCB design, 3D printing and C just to listen to music
a day ago
- Built a music streamer with a 17-inch LP-sized display to show album artwork, motivated by nostalgia for physical cover art.
- Hardware includes a 17" industrial IPS LCD (1920x1920), Radxa CM3 compute module, custom carrier board, USB-C PD power, USB-C for DAC, Gigabit Ethernet, and 12V trigger.
- Designed a thin enclosure in FreeCAD, learned parametric CAD and 3D printing, iterated through four board revisions to achieve working hardware.
- Software uses shairport-sync for AirPlay on a minimal Alpine Linux, with GPU-accelerated display app that cross-fades 4MP images at 60 fps.
- Added an out-of-band protocol extension to stream full-resolution artwork (AirPlay only sends low-res ~500x500 pixels).
- Device always on, consumes <2W when idle, wakes automatically on streaming, powers amplifier via 12V trigger; total ~24W at full brightness.
- Considering a Kickstarter campaign; sign-up link provided for updates.