Junkbox

A web-enabled jukebox made from an upcycled speaker display. Song requests can be made at junkbox.live for the speaker to play, for free! Great for public settings or a small venue.

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Inspiration

Our hack was inspired by the lack musical freedom in social gatherings. In most public settings, the music you hear is pre-decided and can often miss the mark when it comes to matching the temperature of the room. Junkbox is designed to bring back the liberty of your classic jukebox, but with an infinitely larger music library and easy-to-use interface!

What it does

Users simply request a song title to be played on our website https://junkbox.live. That's it! No quarters or login information needed. Every song request gets placed in a queue for the Junkbox display to begin playing.

How we built it

Junkbox was built from an old Bluetooth speaker display that was being thrown away, hence the name. We didn't want to let it end up in a landfill, so we decided to repurpose it! When a user requests a song on the site, the request gets sent off to a backend server, which pulls audio using YouTube's API and outputs it to the speaker for everyone around to hear.

Challenges we ran into

The most significant challenge we ran into was getting audio to play when input was received. Our frontend and backend were written in two different languages and hosted on two separate servers, but luckily our team pulled together the best ideas to make an elegant solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of the final fit-and-finish of Junkbox. The end-user experience flows very nicely and looks great on mobile. This is also our first hackathon where we managed to finish on time and still have all the features we originally intended.

What we learned

This year we learned a lot about the importance of starting your project as soon as hacking begins. Having a good plan and knowing a thing or two about the tools you are using were also pivotal in staying on course and not getting stressed when things didn't work on the first try.

What's next for Junkbox

We would like to eventually show the user where their request sits in the queue, and also the other songs that people have requested. It would also be cool to figure out how to scale this idea to allow people to build Junkboxes of their own!

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