Daily Life Simplified Through Complex Projects

Innovative Solutions Offered for Convenience and Utility

Explore how technology can transform everyday tasks into seamless experiences. My projects leverage cutting-edge solutions to enhance the ease and functionality of daily life through a blend of creativity and technical expertise. From microcontroller systems to smart automation, I turn complex ideas into practical tools.

Spotify “Now Playing” Screen

This project’s goal was to mimic the behavior of the now discontinued Spotify CarThing using a Raspberry Pi Pico W and an LCD screen.

My first step was to load MicroPython onto the Pico W. From this point, I was able to create a webserver to authenticate Spotify and then continue making calls to the Spotify API in order to get information about user’s currently playing song.

Once the webserver was created, I was able to use the Pico W’s GPIO pins to connect to an LCD display. In order to display graphics to the screen I used a custom ILI9341 driver I found online. Using this driver, I was able to display text in various fonts, draw simple shapes, and load bitmap images to the screen.

I was able to take information straight from the API response to print to the screen such as the artist name and song name, but I ran into issues with the album art. I was able to download the image directly to the Pico W from the URL returned by the API, but this image was useless without being in a bitmap form.

Image processing libraries such as Pillow/PIL were too heavyweight for the Pico W, so I had to come up with a work around. Ultimately, I ended up writing a Python script to get the album arts from my playlists (using the link to the playlist as input) in the necessary bitmap format.

I then loaded these images onto an SD card and wired the SD card slot on the LCD screen to be functional. After doing so, I was able to use the logic I had already written for the Pico in MicroPython to update the song name, artist name, and album art when necessary (refreshing automatically when the song changes)

It is also worth noting that all of this was set up to run on my phone’s hotspot. Thus, I am able to use my device as my very own “CarThing.”

The Products That Made
This Project Possible

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