Listening to music on Spotify can certainly be a rewarding experience but it's the way we interact with our music in the real world that can make a difference. That's why we're excited about this cool Raspberry Pi Pico-powered project created by maker and developer Bas. Using our favorite microcontroller, he's created a barcode scanning system that recognizes the barcodes from your favorite CDs and uses the data to queue up the music automatically on Spotify.
As simple as this project idea sounds, it's actually quite involved and took a bit of engineering to pull off. First, as you might have guessed, you must scan a barcode from the CD you want to listen to. This barcode is parsed using MQTT to a home assistant. The Raspberry Pi has a script that checks for the album through a music database known as Discogs. Once the album has been identified, the song is queued up using the Spotify API and plays in Bas's living room.
