Creating a Spotify remote with an Arduino and LCD Shield

This one is for the Spotify people. We’ve created a small project that makes use of the Arduino and LCD Keypad shield to create a Spotify remote control. This will show the current playing song as well as adding Play/Pause, Prev and Next functionality to it.

Check out the quick YouTube video at the bottom of this page.

The remote is made from a VB.NET application that listens on a select COM port for commands, it also broadcasts the current playing song via the COM port to the Arduino.

So, what’s needed?

We’ll begin by creating the Arduino sketch. What we need to do is the following:

  1. Read the Serial Port and look for incoming characters that make up the current song.
  2. Listen for button presses and Serial.println() commands.
  3. Display the current song on the LCD (with Scrolling Text)

The application works by listening and sending information on the same COM port as the Arduino. The application listens for 3 commands (play/plause, prev, next) once these get detected they send the relevant command over to the Spotify application. Information about the current song is then sent to the COM port and received by the Arduino, which outputs this to the attached LCD screen.

It’s actually quite fun to play around with; this would look great sat on the desk with an enclosure made for it.

That’s it for now, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions then please feel free to comment below or send us a message using the contact us page.

Have fun!

 

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