ECE 110/120 Honors Lab Section : NFC Vinyl Collection

Statement of Purpose

Please provide a brief description of your project. List the goals and objectives of your project and explain why this project is useful for the problem your group want to solve or functions that make your project unique. 

We will use NFC technology for our project to make choosing the music that you play much easier. We will place tags on images of albums that tell your device to open that album on Spotify and start playing it. We will use an NFC reader add-on to a Raspberry Pi and it will make it much faster to listen to music. We chose this idea because we both love listening to music and want cool decorations to add to rooms to spice them up. It’s a modern take on vinyl collections.

Background Research

Please provide details on the background research your group has done for your project. Explain what drives you to work on this project and/or why this project is important. Also include discussions on any similar projects your group have looked at in coming up with your project. How is your proposed project different or similar to those your group have looked at. 

NFC, or Near-Field Communication, is involved in many daily activities, such as in credit chips and device connections. We are driven to work on this project because we both like to listen to music and would like to add a music themed decoration to our rooms. We have seen other simpler projects that worked similarly to this where people connect their smartphones. Ours will be different, however because we will be using a Raspberry pi and using the Spotify API to use it to play music on our computer.

Block Diagram / Flow Chart

Provide a simple block diagram of your hardware design. A block diagram is a schematic graphic that shows the interactions between different components in a hardware or software system. If appropriate, please also include a flow chart showing the steps your design needs to go through to function. The online program draw.io is a great tool to create polished block diagrams and flow charts. Likewise Microsoft's visio is also a great program to create block diagrams and flow charts.

System Overview

Provide descriptions to your block diagram and flow chart. State the purpose of each block.

Write Process:

We will first write a script on the Raspberry Pi that will allow us to assign a string of characters to the NFC tag. The Raspberry Pi will tell the NFC sensor to write the string to the NFC tag.

Read Process:

We will first write a script on the Raspberry Pi that will allow us to read the string on an NFC tag. The NFC sensor will read the code on the tag and send it to the Raspberry Pi. The script on the Raspberry Pi will look through the database to see if a song name matches the code. If it does, it will tell the Spotify Web API to play the album on a playback device. If not, a red LED connected to the Raspberry Pi will light up indication that an error has occurred.

Parts

Possible Challenges

Please list some of the challenges that your group foresee in working on your project.

The hardware should be relatively straightforward, but there are several main tasks we have to figure out in the coding process. The first task is writing a code that can read and write to NFC tags. Secondly, we must write a code that decodes the NFC and provides a command to the Spotify Web API to play a certain album. We might have some trouble with the Spotify API, especially with the Web Player. There are certain limitations to the API and we will have to work around it.

References

List all references you used in your proposal. This is important, you do not want to be blamed for plagiarism. IEEE citation format is highly recommended. You can use citethisforme.com's IEEE citation generator to painlessly generate your references in this style.

 References

[1]l. ada, "Adafruit PN532 RFID/NFC Breakout and Shield", Adafruit Learning System, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-pn532-rfid-nfc/breakout-wiring. [Accessed: 14- Feb- 2022].

[2]"How to setup a nfc reader on raspberry pi", Ozeki.hu, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://ozeki.hu/p_3023-how-to-setup-a-nfc-reader-on-raspberry-pi.html#:~:text=Raspberry%20PI%20NFC%20Reader%20Control,for%20authenticating%20persons%20or%20object. [Accessed: 14- Feb- 2022].

[3]"What is an NFC Chip? - STMicroelectronics", STMicroelectronics, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/support/learning/essentials-and-insights/connectivity/nfc/nfc-chips.html. [Accessed: 14- Feb- 2022].