An old parking meter and a Pi make beautiful music together

You can't park there, mate

An enterprising engineer has turned an old parking meter into a jukebox using a Pi Zero 2 and some open source code.

Reddit user Connect_Use2528 began the project when their wife asked them to paint a decommissioned parking meter baby pink. The lock was drilled out and the pondering began. Could this old bit of urban architecture be turned into a jukebox?

There is plenty of precedent for transforming objects into jukeboxes using a humble Raspberry Pi. A good example is the Phoniebox project, now approaching version 3 and providing a way to play audio files, playlists, podcasts, and Spotify streams triggered by RFID cards. According to the project, it's "all plug and play via USB, no soldering iron needed."

Connect_Use2528 has taken the meter's shell and popped some RFID chips onto cards that can be used to access playlists, adjust the volume, and pause playback. Inserting a playlist card in the slot makes the device skip to the next track. "There is also the world's tiniest 'now playing' OLED screen on the backside where the solar panel was."

Phoniebox provided some inspiration for the project, and the desire to play Spotify playlists meant that a Pi Zero 2 W was needed rather than the weedier Pi Zero W.

"As for open source libs I used pygame for playback, mfrc522, Adafruit CircuitPython for display."

AI refuseniks will be alarmed to learn that "in the end, and much to my own dismay, I had to rely on Claude to come up with a barebones operation that would work with what I had."

It is undoubtedly a splendid use of a retired parking meter. As street adornments become a thing of the past and are replaced by parking apps that require a degree in computer science to operate, there is a particular joy in having something into which a physical card can be inserted, and music played.

And yes, of course, there is a parking meter playlist on Spotify, although we suspect that Bob Dylan's line, "don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters," was not really about parking meters at all. ®