I found this beautiful antique wood radio at an antique store for $12. The electronics were pretty far gone, so I thought it would be a great choice for a mp3 project.
I cleaned and oiled the wood case, and salvaged what radio parts I could for future projects. From Temu, I purchased a fine copper mesh to use as speaker cloth ($2) and a DFPlayer Mini ($2). I loaded an SD card up with music from the 1920s to 1940s, then I wrote a simple script that will continuously play random tracks from the SD card. Using an Arduino and a 3W speaker I already had, I wired the circuit up. I decided to use the original radio knobs to control the Arduino, because that’s a lot more fun. I had to make a custom speaker mount out of some salvaged aluminum sheet I had, which turned out well. Finally, I put a couple of LEDs behind the dial to replace the original incandescent bulbs, and assembled everything. Here is the final result:
