the raspberry pi had been collecting dust for the last five years. a chocolate box that i found at my parent's house is what gave me the original idea. i had a lot of trouble getting the pi to work again. trying to remember how to use the os and all that was confusing. then i realized that my pi (zero w) was the weakest of the weak with only 512mb and 1ghz single core cpu. it couldn't even open the prebuilt web browsers and it kept bricking every time i would try to install a new one. so after going through a few legacy os, i was finally able to get it running.
the day that i finally got shit running was very hacker coded. even the evil music app knew what i was doing - it titled it's ai generated playlist "beats and breaks hacker tuesday". i played only sombra that day also leading up to me figuring shit out on the pi and even got the music festival legendary skin from a lootbox. hack the planet, i guess.
after getting the os running and setting up ftp file transfer so that i can drop files in from the mac into the pi, i was able to get qmmp installed and start trying out some winamp skins that would fit the style of the boxes i have. i got acquainted with soulseek and downloaded the album that was in my head when the idea had first come to mind.
the original idea was to have the red box be a plaid cloth coated musicbox with a little mirror on the inside. that same night i realized that the pi zero fits perfectly into the tiniest music box i have. luckily the usb to aux cable that i had combined with the zero4u pi expansion was all i needed to get sound out of that thing. i've done about all i can do with the hardware i have. next, i need to get a screen, a speaker, keys, a battery, and maybe some other component to trigger the on/off switch when opening/closing the lid.
