Spotify Box Worklog

What’s happened recently

It’s been a while since the last update and a few things have happened. I’ll try to keep it short:

1. Great news: the Spotify Box won an IxDA Award in the Disrupting category! This is not breaking news, it’s been a few months since IxDA announced the winners, but I never posted it here. Check all the awarded projects, there’s really cool stuff. I’m also really happy that Isaac was awarded with the best student project.

2. The other news is that we’ll have a Raspberry Pi very soon. The Raspberry Pi seems to be a better option than the Chumby (price, size…). The Raspberry Pi foundation is doing their best to handle the massive amount of orders. A few of us at IDEO tried to place orders when they launched in February with no luck, but it looks like finally the boards will be arriving sometime next week.

The schematics are public and we’ll probably base the electronics design on it, but we’ll get started with the Raspberry Pi for the first fully functional prototype.

I’m in conversations with an embedded linux development company to figure out how can we work together and get the ARM software done, so hopefully we’ll get started soon.

And that’s all for now. I’ll keep you posted.

Help us with the People’s Choice IxDA Awards 2012

We’re really happy that the Spotify Box has been selected finalist for the IxDA Awards 2012. The winners will be announced at the Interaction12 conference in Dublin next week. In the meantime, we would really appreciate your vote for the People’s Choice award.

Thanks for your support, let’s hope for the best!

A few updates on the project

It’s been a few months and a lot of things happened. Now that I’ve finally settled in Chicago, I do have more time to continue working on this.

After presenting the project at Spotify in Stockholm, Nick Barkas, engineer at Spotify, joined me and we’re now working together porting the concept to the Chumby hacker board. He’s doing the code and I’m taking care of the hardware.

Nick has already managed to get libspotify working on the Chumby. He is rewriting the code to get the whole concept working on it, this way it’d be completely standalone.

We have no idea of how long this is gonna take us. There’s still a lot to do and this is a side project, we’re both busy with our full-time jobs, but hopefully we’ll move forward with a more final version of the device and we’ll take it from there.

In the meantime, while Nick works on the code, I’ll be modifying the industrial design. We’ll probably make some changes: the LED matrices take too much space and we are gonna try to find a different way to give feedback avoiding them (the driver chips I used are a bit expensive and the whole thing takes too much space).

The industrial design will have to be modified to accomodate the new hardware too: the Chumby hacker board (which is bigger than the arduino), the wi-fi module, speaker, battery…

Ross and Stephan, colleagues from IDEO, are also going to join us and help out with the design changes.

We’re all pretty excited about it and will keep sharing stuff as we move forward! :)

More high-res pictures and a few updates

I’ve taken a few more high-res shots of the device with better light. All the pictures have been added to the same Flickr set I’ve been using before: From paper to final prototype.

Now that the final report is 100% finished and I got a PASS (yay!), I’ve been shooting some footage for a video to explain the concept. Everything is ready to start editing. I’ll upload it to Vimeo in a week or two. So far it’s looking good! :)

Besides that, a lot of people asked me to Kickstart the project. It’s definitely an option I’ve been thinking about, but I’m still deciding what would be the best way to move the project forward. Maybe finding somebody interested in producing it, open-sourcing it, using Kickstarter and continue it on my own…

In the meantime, if anybody out there has experience with ARM custom PCB boards, please drop me a line (my email is on the top of this page), I’d like to discuss some of the technical options, what could be the costs of designing/producing a custom board like this and this kind of technical stuff.

And thanks again for all the great feedback on blogs, by email and on twitter! I’ll try to reply to everyone asap!

A few notes about the project

The project got a lot of buzz during the last days after Creative Applications and TechCrunch wrote about it. I’m flattered about all the feedback and really glad that people like the project, so thanks for all the retweets, comments and articles about it! :)

Just to clarify a few things that started to get distorted.

- The concept is a standalone player that comes with 8 tags that can be linked to music. It can be for yourself, or to give it to somebody else as a present, giving you the chance to link music to the tags before giving it to that person… In a way, like we used to do with mixtapes, but now the “mixtapes” are RFID tags linked to music on Spotify.

- This is a working prototype that I built to show and test the concept, it’s not a final product. It is suposed to be a standalone player with its own speakers and wifi connection, but at the moment it has to be connected to the computer to play music. I can’t run libspotify nor play music from Spotify on the Arduino, but it would be possible on an embedded linux. It’s a prototype, not a final product.

- The RFID tags don’t store any music, they are just linked to a certain Spotify URI or search. Each tag has a unique ID, and each unique ID points to Spotify music. That’s it, the music is not in the tag, it’s on Spotify.

- It is obviously very inspired by the work of Dieter Rams for Braun. There’s no secret about that. Most designers will recognize the similarities at first glance. Giving it that look and feel was completely intentional. This project makes reference to the benefits of analog music devices. We’re now moving towards digital content, it was the intention to make it feel like a product we’ve seen before while making use of newer technology available and a music streaming service.

- One of the goals was to keep it as cheap as possible so more people would be able to afford it if it were to be produced. Something like this would cost around 50$ to produce instead of the 200$ people have to pay for a Squeezebox or a Sonos system, that costs even more.

- I would love to bring this project to life, but it is a BIG project. Even if I got funding from Kickstarter, it is complex. The glif, for instance, is “just a physical object”: no mechanical parts, no electronics… and still a lot of work. A device like this has electronics, needs support, software… I’ll do my best to keep it going, but at the moment it’s just a concept.

- Christian Wilsson (Art Director at Spotify) has been giving me feedback during the project. They know about the result and I’d be really happy if they want to do something with it. But again, at the moment this is just a final degree project.

I hope this post makes everything a bit more clear.

Thanks again!
Jordi

Final pictures and display tests

Tomorrow is the examination day. I have been busy updating the final report, tomorrow’s presentation and tweaking the last details for the demo I will be showing. The error messages are now displayed on the LED matrix: low battery, connection error, shuffle on/off… I will shoot more footage to explain the concept during next week, once I can focus only on wrapping the project up. Right now there have been too many things happening at the same time and still haven’t had the time.

We’ll have a small exhibition in a couple of weeks to show the model. I’ll be going to Stockholm to present the project at Spotify by the end of the month too, so I will try to add the project to the portfolio as soon as I can and share the Processing and Arduino files in case somebody wants to build their own. In the meantime I updated the Flickr set with a few more studio shots I took last week.

UI finished and packaging almost done too

It’s been less than a month since the last update. One month ago I was finishing the workflows for the UI and its wireframes. Now the UI is 100% finished. I worked hard on finding a way of not having to write the ID of each RFID tag. It is easy to make mistakes. But I came up with a pretty neat fix. Each box has a unique ID, and when the devices would be produced, we keep track of the RFID tags in each box. The RFID tags in the box are labeled with a color code and to link music to it, you just have to type the ID of the box for the first time, and you can always link and relink tags using the color code!

I’ll show more details about it when I film the scenarios. I’ve just finished the packaging for the device. It includes 8 tags, the usb cable and a stand for the tags. I have to prepare the graphics for the lid of the box and the hardware is done. In the next days I’ll be preparing the demo for the presentation and the presentation, taking more decent pictures and will shoot some footage showing the final design.

Workflows and wireframes

Okay, at this point I have the different workflows that have to be refined. To make things a bit more clear, keep this in mind: each device has a unique serial number, and that serial number is sold with a set of RFID tags, so we can keep track of the tags bundled with each device.

Keeping this in mind, the key scenarios at the moment are:

Linking tags for somebody else to give it as a present
Let’s say I buy the Spotify box for somebody else. I want to tag music for the person that will receive the present. The box will have a unique ID and different color-coded tags. By introducing the ID of the gift box I have purchased, I can link music without having to connect the device.

This way, there’s only one input field, and the tagging process for each tag has no room for mistakes.

Setting up the device
Once the device is connected, it pops up in the Spotify application window and will go through the process of setup: choosing wifi connection, tagging music (if it hasn’t already been tagged) and done.

Linking tags for myself, relinking tags that weren’t used or using additional tags
If I have bought the device for myself, once I connect it for the first time, the device will go through the setup steps. At some point, it will prompt the user to a tagging screen. The software has already recognized the serial number of the device, so we can tag the music the same way as if it was for somebody else.

Once the device has been setup, relinking tags becomes easier. Placing a tag on the device will display its link in the Spotify application. If we want to modify that link, we do it in that screen and apply changes. This way we avoid again having to input the ID manually.

From paper to final prototype

For the past weeks I’ve been mostly working on the final container for the device. It’s been three weeks of work moving from the breadboard sketch to a handmade PCB. Unfortunately, I’ve had to take a week and a half off and I haven’t been able to work 100% on the project during the past week, but I still think I’m on schedule with all the deliverables.

This post shows part of the process moving from a provisional breadboard prototype to something more permanent. The footprint of the actual prototype is fairly small and there’s space left for the battery and its connectors.

I also decided to include three LED matrix, a total of 192 LED’s, to display information under the pattern of the speaker. In the video below you can see the LED’s turning on individually. It is just testing them to see if everything is working, but eventually they will be used to display battery levels, internet connection problems, premium subscription days left and other information that might not be always necessary, but that has to be there when things go wrong. Having a screen or some kind of indicators for that would be a waste of space, since most of the time everything will be working fine and there’s no need to have a screen showing nothing.

The two small buttons on the bottom left of the device skip to the previous and next track in the queue. The big know is the volume, and the magnets are place on top of it. The knob has a magnet so the RFID tags stick to it.

The RFID reader had to be slightly angled in order to read the tags properly. So far, with this setup there are no interferences and everything works really smoothly.

Designing the stickers for the RFID tags and the way they are stored is in next in the to-do list as well as the way Spotify URI’s are linked to the different tags.