Summary
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LILYGO T-LoRa ESP32 pager hacked into Melody Machine portable music player.
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Plays MP3 from SD, streams internet radio, LVGL UI, Wi-Fi manager and persistent settings.
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Get files and build on GitHub – Grab the Melody Machine code and build your own pager player.
While Raspberry Pis and ESP32s are great for hobbyists, they also regularly find themselves in products. After all, they’re very useful, so it’s natural for companies to use them as their hardware of choice when building something small that doesn’t necessarily need to be a powerhouse.
However, this also means that curious tinkerers will open the shell and mess with its innards. Yes, it’s more of a ‘will’ than a ‘may’. This is the case of the LILYGO T-LoRa Pager, someone made it to be a portable music player. If you just have a pager sitting around (who doesn’t?), you can even download the code to do it yourself.
Because who pages everything these days?
As published in ESP32 subreddituser No_Wallaby6061 showed off what they did with the LILYGO T-LoRa Pager they got their hands on. Since the LILYGO uses an ESP32 under the hood, No_Wallaby6061 got to work turning it into a cool portable music player that can play songs stored in its memory or on the internet. The end result is called the Melody Machine, and it honestly looks pretty slick.
Full list of Melody Machine features:
- MP3 player — plays MP3 files from SD card with folder browsing, shuffle and repeat modes
- Internet radio — Streams internet radio via M3U playlists over WiFi (ICY metadata support)
- LVGL UI — Graphical interface on 480×222 TFT display with 4 changeable themes
- WiFi manager — unblocked WiFi with network list, password entry via on-screen keyboard and automatic reconnection
- Parameters — all settings saved as JSON on SD card; survives reboots and reflashes
- Dual core audio — MP3 decoding works on Core 0 via FreeRTOS, keeping the UI responsive on Core 1
If you want to check it out for yourself or even do it yourself, go for it Melody Machine GitHub page for all the information and files you need.
