qrocodile: A Kid-friendly Sonos Controller #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi
Chris Campbell created the qrocodile using a Raspberry Pi to read QR codes. On top of making a fun electronics project it looks like Chris is also introducing the kids to some great music. Via la bonne soupe:
I was lamenting aloud the number of steps it takes, and then my brain got started pondering solutions. Take off my tin foil hat and give in to the Alexa craze? Buy some sort of IoT button thing? An RFID tag thing? QR codes maybe? The latter option got me thinking of all kinds of possibilities. Maybe the kids could choose dinner music from any number of songs/albums (from Spotify or my local collection) just by waving a QR code in front of something. Or maybe now they could build their own dance party playlists.
It seemed like a fun thing to explore, so I ordered a Raspberry Pi and a cheap camera. The next day it arrived and the hacking began. This was a fun little (multi-)weekend project. What started as “make the simplest possible thing to switch to line-in” quickly led to all kinds of unexpected diversions. Eventually we ended up with something called `qrocodile`, which can be best summarized as a kid-friendly system for controlling Sonos using cards imprinted with QR codes.
This system has a number of advantages over voice assistants like Alexa. My kids don’t often know the proper name of a song and wouldn’t necessarily think to request a certain song, but if they see a stack of cards on the table, they can recognize a band’s name or an album cover by sight and build up a whole queue of songs simply by stacking and organizing their cards. It’s fun to watch, and I hope this project inspires you to introduce this sort of physical computing into your own home.
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