Hi everyone. I am back, much refreshed and revived by a holiday to lovely Croatia (which I can thoroughly recommend!).

Ross Porter’s father could no longer operate his CD player to play his favourite music due to impaired mental function caused by dementia. Knowing that music was incredibly beneficial to people in his father’s position, Ross set about making a music box that could be operated simply. He used two rotary encoders fed through to a Raspberry Pi to do this. Pressing or rotating either knob starts the music going. One knob controls the volume and the other changes songs from a playlist stored on a USB drive. His final product came out as above. He’s now documented the build process and open sourced all the designs and software, designing two other cases in the process (one of which is shown below).

I think you’ll agree, this is a lovely idea and I applaud Ross for his efforts to bring music back to his father. You can see a presentation of the music box below and find out how to make your own here: