Developer ‘upgrades’ 17-year-old iPod with Wi-Fi and Spotify support

In what can only be described as the ultimate form of DIY tech, a developer has retrofitted a 17-year-old ‘classic’ iPod released by Apple in 2004 (and gifted to him by his mother-in-law) with Wi-Fi and Spotify support and turning it into an internet-connected music player.

The intricate life-hack posted by Guy Dupont to YouTube, in which he tells viewers how he managed to fit in all the necessary parts (including a Raspberry Pi Zero W) to make it an internet music player, was picked up by Gizmodo. Hardware aside, the developer also had to code a miniature interface for the new device in Python after he gutted many of the parts to make room for the new ones.

With the limited space available inside the device, Dupont would have to get rid of most of Apple’s components, which he described on Hackaday. Replacing the main board with a Raspberry Pi Zero W with Bluetooth built-in, a new colour display, a Micro-USB port, and a better battery (which makes sense considering the device is Wi-Fi enabled). He even managed to add haptic support for the iPod’s click wheel, but adds a disclaimer that the haptics don’t sync perfectly with the UI.

Dupont says he used Raspberry Pi OS Lite and that he found the Pi Zero was more capable then he originally thought. In order to plug into Spotify, he installed Raspotify, which runs as a background service once everything was set up. Using Python, he was able to login, search Spotify's catalog, fetch his saved artists, albums and playlists, and send playback commands to Spotify's servers.

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Dupont’s hack essentially means that users who left their classic iPods lying in their drawers or cupboards because of the hassle of syncing your music from a computer, can now modify them to work exactly like Spotify does on their own phones. You could probably fool a few people who’d never used the classic iPod into believing this was a new model with a dark theme built-in, along with Spotify support.