Loco Introduction

Loco is software that makes it possible to play Spotify and Internet Radio on the low cost ESP32 micro.

There are over 100 million tracks on Spotify and there are 263 million subscribers worldwide.

Until now Spotify needed a program called Spotify Connect that used 10Mb of memory so was too big for a cheap micro.

Loco can do a lot more than just Spotify Connect. 

  • Display album art and what's playing
  • Browse and play anything on Spotify - without a mobile device
  • Browse and play the 70,000 internet radio stations on Airable

Loco takes care of all the complexity so you can program your own features.

How about

  • One touch buttons to play music to match your mood - high energy, calm, love songs
  • One touch button to play nursery rhymes or read a story for your children
  • A button to play the latest Joe Rogan podcast, or the latest news.
  • Display lyrics as the music plays
  • Display a music visualiser - sound to light 

Loco is basically a new way for Spotify subscribers to play their music.

The Loco software will only run on Loco PCBs. The PCBs are available to hobbyists and manufacturers.  

This photograph shows a Loco development PCB with display and buttons on an expansion PCB.

The development board contains the ESP32, an ES8388 DAC and a USB UART chip (for connection to a PC)

The display board has a 320x170 TFT SPI display, some buttons and a rotary encoder. There is also an micro SD card connector (hidden).

EasyEDA design files are here.

The Loco software is compiled using the Espressif ESP-IDF framework. You can find instructions to install ESP-IDF and download and compile a demo program here

Example code

We plan to distribute a number of example programs to show how to use Loco.

The first program locoDemo1 has a lot of features

  • Spotify Connect
  • Menu driven UI on TFT
  • Web UI
  • Play Spotify Playlists and Podcasts standalone
  • Browse, Search and play the Airable internet radio catalogue

The code is available on Github here.

locoDemo2 is a simpler program that supports Spotify Connect. Its easier to understand than the full featured locoDemo1.

Contact

If you want to register your interest, find out more or give us some feedback email us at.

loco@brennan.co.uk