I learned PCB design, 3D printing and C just to listen to music

He taught himself everything to make album art huge again—and the comments are obsessed

TLDR: A hobbyist learned multiple skills just to build a music player that restores big, beautiful album art to streaming. Commenters loved the ambition but instantly demanded the missing behind-the-scenes details, turning the reaction into equal parts applause, curiosity, and nerdy nostalgia.

A music lover got so fed up with tiny streaming thumbnails that he basically went full main character energy: he taught himself circuit board design, 3D printing, coding, and hardware hacking just to build a wall-worthy music streamer that shows album art like an old-school record sleeve. The gadget wakes up when music starts, displays the cover in glorious size, and even teases a possible Kickstarter. On paper, it’s a sweet story about passion meeting nostalgia. In the comments? It turned into a mix of applause, interrogation, and niche thirst.

The strongest reaction was simple: people are impressed. One commenter practically framed the whole project as a hobbyist miracle, marveling that someone pulled this off with mostly free tools. But the praise quickly came with that classic internet side-eye. A few readers wanted the messy details, especially the part where the creator admits the 3D printing was a “disaster” before it finally worked. Translation: commenters were like, don’t skip the juicy failure arc! Others zoomed in on the homemade workaround for getting high-quality album art, basically saying, “Okay… but how, exactly?”

Then came the side quests. One person used the post as a launchpad for a wistful rant about wanting neighborhood “PCB shops,” like the old photo stores of the past—a weirdly charming bit of maker-world nostalgia. And amid all the tinkering talk, one commenter simply recognized the album shown and swooned: “What a beautiful record!” So yes, the build is cool—but the real mood is a delightful pileup of admiration, curiosity, nostalgia, and extremely online nitpicking.

Key Points

  • The author built a custom music streamer with a 17-inch 1920x1920 display intended to show album artwork at vinyl-sleeve scale.
  • The hardware uses a Radxa CM3 compute module on a custom carrier PCB that took four revisions to function as expected.
  • The software stack uses shairport-sync on a reduced Alpine Linux image to support AirPlay playback.
  • A custom C application displays artwork and uses GPU acceleration to cross-fade 4MP images at 60 fps.
  • Because AirPlay transmits only low-resolution artwork, the author added an out-of-band protocol extension to send full-resolution images to the device.

Hottest takes

"Would have been nice to hear how specifically it was made to work in the end." — mananaysiempre
"I wonder how that works." — kubb
"Couldn’t we get a ‘PCB shop’ in our bright near future?" — dsign
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