Summary
- LILYGO T-LoRa ESP32 pager hacked into the Melody Machine portable music player.
- Plays MP3s from SD, streams internet radio, LVGL UI, Wi-Fi manager, and persistent settings.
- Source and build files on GitHub- grab the Melody Machine code and make your own pager player.
While Raspberry Pis and ESP32s are great for hobbyists, they also regularly find themselves in products. They’re very useful, after all, so it’s only natural that companies will use them as their hardware of choice when making something small that doesn’t need to be an absolute powerhouse.
However, that also means that curious tinkerers are going to pop open the shell and mess with its innards. And yes, it’s more of a ‘will’ than a ‘may’. Such is the case of the LILYGO T-LoRa Pager, which someone has tweaked to turn it into a portable music player. And if you just so happen to have a pager sitting around (who doesn’t?), you can even download the code to do it yourself.
You, too, can build this $15 ESP32 internet radio that brings Winamp into the modern era
It’s easy to build, too.
Because who pages things these days, anyway?
As posted on the ESP32 subreddit, user No_Wallaby6061 showed off what they’ve been doing with a LILYGO T-LoRa Pager they got their hands on. Because the LILYGO uses an ESP32 under the hood, No_Wallaby6061 got to work turning it into a cool portable music player that can play songs either stored on its memory or over the internet. The end result is called the Melody Machine, and honestly, it looks very sleek.
Here’s a full list of features for the Melody Machine:
- MP3 Player — plays MP3 files from SD card with folder browsing, shuffle, and repeat modes
- Internet Radio — streams internet radio via M3U playlists over WiFi (ICY metadata support)
- LVGL UI — graphical interface on the 480×222 TFT display with 4 switchable themes
- WiFi Manager — non-blocking WiFi with network list, password entry via on-screen keyboard, and auto-reconnect
- Settings — all settings persisted as JSON on SD card; survives reboots and reflashes
- Dual-core audio — MP3 decoding runs on Core 0 via FreeRTOS, keeping the UI responsive on Core 1
If you’d like to check it out for yourself, or even make your own, head over to the Melody Machine GitHub page for all the information and files you need.
