Raspberry Pi Sonos Radio Uses NFC Albums to Change Songs

Looking for a fun summer project you can groove to? This Raspberry Pi project is perfect for music lovers. It was created by developer Mark Hank and designed to play music through Sonos by scanning albums fitted with NFC chips.

The project uses a Raspberry Pi 3 A+ with an NFC reader housed inside an old Sonos Boost Box. To choose a playlist or album, pick one of the NFC tagged albums and hover it above the Sonos box. The playlist or album you chose will play as soon as it's scanned.

Hank used thick cardstock to print out album artwork for his NFC chips, but you can use anything. Hank also set aside cassette tapes to use for playlists, essentially creating the modern-day mixtape.

The operation is totally headless. Even though Hank uses a phone to demonstrate the changing music, this would occur without the smartphone. Everything is handled between the Raspberry Pi and Sonos controller.

The software is designed to integrate the nfcpy library and Sonos API. The setup can be configured to pull music from streaming services like iTunes or Spotify and play it through the Sonos system.

You can check out the code on Github and even recreate the project yourself. Be sure to follow Mark Hank on Reddit for more cool Pi projects and any updates on this one.