Our Records Know When They're Played

Two years ago, we built a little something that we still use quite often: a “Playing Now” shelf for the vinyl sleeve of the currently playing vinyl. But that’s not all: this shelf is NFC-enabled and records all vinyls that we play. This was Chris’ idea, not long after we bought a vinyl player. He started by sketching out what it should look like, and what functionality he wanted it to have. Fortunately, he’s good at 3D things, not just 3D printing, but general work with real materials. Playing Now: My 21st Century Blues He did the schematics, the laser cutting of the wood and of the acrylic, as well as the assembly. I mostly stuck to the software. I decided to keep the ESP32 as stupid as possible: it just needs to read the NFC tag and send it to the backend. For the backend, I built a small single-user server that keeps a little SQLite database where all the vinyls are registered and connected to an NFC tag. Once a new tag is scanned, we get a notification on Telegram with a link to…