Sleepywaves

A RFID powered musick/audiobook player with configurable tracklists and playing modes.

Place a tag onto the reader to start playing. Remove it to stop, or configure a timeout to stop automatically.

Prerequisites / Recommended Setup

• Raspberry Pi (any with audio and SPI. 3A+ works fine)
• MFRC522 RFID reader module
• storage medium, e.g. USB stick. Works with SD if nothing else is available.
• dietpi with the following packages installed:
  • mpd - audio player
  • python3
    • pip3 install poetry
  • (mympd) - optional web control UI
  • (samba server) - optional file share server to easily copy new tracks
• enable SPI in dietpi-config

Installation

Sleepywaves uses poetry to prepare the python environment. Install it with:

• Clone/download the repository
• Run poetry install to create a venv with the required python packages.
• See sleepywaves.example.service for a reference how a systemd unit file could look like

Running

• Run poetry shell or use the python path from the poetry venv directly in the command below.
• Run python sleepywaves.py -m <MEDIA DIR>

Alternatively, start with systemd: systemctl enable sleepywaves.service and systemctl start sleepywaves.service.

Tag / title configuration

A new config file is created in the media directory once a new tag is scanned. It will be named changeme_<tag id>.json. Remove the changeme_ prefix, and configure the file as you wish.

Tracks are added to the tracks list in the file, and the start time in a track can be configured by adding a "<name>":<seconds> pair to start_times.

Setting a timeout other than 0 will enable the sleep timer. The player will stop after the configured time in seconds, even if the tag is still present on the reader.

These modes are supported:

Play mode	Description
sequence	Start with the first track (at custom start time if configured), advance through the list one-by-one
random	Select a random track from tracks (at custom start time if configured) each time the tag is put on the reader, or after one track finishes playing
random_sequence	Select a random track from tracks (at custom start time if configured) when the tag is put on the reader. After the track finishes, advance to the next in the tracks list
random_start_sequence	Select a random starting track and time from the list of start_times. Advance to the next track in tracks after it finishes playing

Setting resume_track to true will save the current playing position if the tag is removed, or the timer is reached. Playback will continue at this point when the tag is put on the reader again.

Note: if a custom start_times entry is present for a track, all playback will start at this time (i.e. even if the track is next-in-line for sequence play mode).

Note: the random_start_sequence mode is most useful for using audiobooks with chapters broken into shorter tracks and the sleep timer feature. If the book e.g. has tracks of ~4 minutes, but the timeout is set to 8 minutes, it will start at one of the configured start tracks and continue playing across the track breaks, but never start at the intermediate tracks.

Adding tracks to a title easily

Adding tracks to the renamed file can be automated with the add_tracks.py tool. Run it as python add_tracks.py -m <media dir> -t <tag id> -p <file name pattern> A pattern of *Hobbit*.mp3 will find <media dir>/Hobbit/chapter1.mp3 and similar. Using the -o flag will overwrite the track list in the title config file (USE WITH CAUTION). If not given, tracks will be appended to the existing tracklist.