Bruno Dias

@bruno

"mr storylets"

he/him
brunodias.dev/

writer (derogatory). lead designer on Fallen London.

THESE POSTS ARE PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE POSTS OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE POSTS.

Bluesky

brunodias.bsky.social

Letterboxd

letterboxd.com/notbrunoagain/

Backloggd

www.backloggd.com/u/notbrunoagain/

Bruno Dias @bruno11/28/2023, 12:36 AM

I'm obsessed with a project idea. The idea is for a hyperskeuomorphic control interface for a music player.

You have a big pile of FDM-printed plastic objects that are vaguely cassette-shaped, or maybe cartridge-shaped.
You slot one into the machine.
The cartridge does not contain music. It just has information that tells the machine what to play. That information is encoded as a QR code hidden as voids in the interior of the cartridge, which the machine can read by shining a bright light through the plastic.
The machine can't play music. It just talks to the network to tell a music app on another device to start playing music.

This is, objectively, very stupid. But imagine the user experience of sitting down to work in the morning and jamming a cartridge into the machine to fire up a playlist, without the actual faff of actual physical media.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @bruno's post:

cass @prophetgoddess11/28/2023, 12:39 AM

something like this exists, but specifically for children. a friend of mine who has a toddler was telling me about how he bought this device which lets little kids play music by connecting to the internet based on which amiibo thing they touch to it. he tried to hack it to let him make his own music amiibos but it's pretty locked down so he wound up just buying a cassette player and putting the ape escape 3 soundtrack on a cassette for his kid

Bruno Dias @bruno11/28/2023, 12:41 AM

Yeah, I'm aware of a similar thing called a Yoto that's available at least in the UK. That one uses standard credit card sized NFC cards instead, but it actually lets you make your own custom cards.

What I'm kind of taken by though is the idea of being able to make a 'card' that doesn't need any extra consumable like an NFC tag - the machine-readable info and human-readable label both could just roll right off the FDM printer

Solly Ross @directxman1211/28/2023, 1:26 AM

huh, i feel like this is... surprisingly doable? kinda wanna try it now

Bruno Dias @bruno11/28/2023, 1:28 AM

Oh it's definitely very feasible if you have an FDM printer and some basic electronics tools.

I assume; I'm not sure how reliable in practice the QR-code-in-voids-inside-a-print idea would be.

Solly Ross @directxman1211/28/2023, 1:29 AM

yeah, that's the part i'd be curious to see. sliiiiightly less accessible, but if you had a multi-filament printer u might be able to make it a bit more consistent read-wise?

Solly Ross @directxman1211/28/2023, 1:28 AM

(thinking out loud) like... the trigger playback part should be pretty easy with something like mpd or roon or whatevs, and there were a few pretty decent qr code libraries last time i checked, so then it's just like... fabbing a cassette player shell + a webcam & a rpi & a bright LED or something

@darryl @darryl11/28/2023, 3:42 AM

I saw someone do this once with 3.5” floppy disks. Every disk contained the path to a song or playlist. Stick a disk in, that song/album starts playing.

Might have been foone??? Genuinely not sure

Pinned Tags