Spootipy

Inspiration

Have you ever wanted a gesture based music system? Have you ever missed the feeling of the physical aspect of owning music?

We have, too, and that’s why we’ve created a brand new invention using a cutting Arduino Mega technology with ultrasonic sensors. Meet Spootipy.

What it does

Our project, Spootipy, is a new and original way of interfacing with your spotify playlist! Spootipy allows you to recapture that feeling of physically interacting with your music. It allows you to use physical objects to control music flow, much like a gramophone.

How we built it

We made Spootipy using a/an:

Arduino Mega
Ultrasonic sensor
Cardboard

We built this project by connecting an ultrasonic sensor to an arduino, but because the arduino itself cannot interact with Spotify APIs, a computer monitors the outputs generated by an ultrasonic sensor and detects the changes in distance and further processes this data.

We’ve tailor-made three album cartridges, which allows us to easily change the album that plays

We’ve also implemented a contactless- high precision, gesture-based volume control, done by raising your hand above the receiver.

Swiping quickly above the receiver allows the user to pause and play.

Challenges we ran into

Hardware shortages prevented us from sourcing some components on-time, where we had to make do with the hardware that we were able to source.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to interact with spootipy using gestures
Developing an alternative solution to album playing using ultrasonic instead of NFC
Being able to successfully learn and develop a project for the first time in arduino

What we learned

We discovered the challenges that come with integrating software and hardware solutions. Throughout this project, we encountered difficulties in combining both spotify and arduino. In addition to this, we’ve learned how to coordinate with our team from the mistakes we made for future projects.