Raspberry Pi Maker Builds Time Machine Radio For His Dad And It's The Coolest Gift Ever

You will find plenty of gift ideas in our Holiday Wish List roundup, in which each all of us at HotHardware picked out up a few tech items that we personally find appealing. However, one thing that's admittedly cooler than all of our picks is the Time Machine Radio that a Raspberry Pi modder built and plans to gift to his dad for Christmas.

It has an old-timey aesthetic with a retro-themed NR-3013 portable radio providing the housing for the project. The modder, who goes by Byte-Rider on GitHub and Aleph Zero on YouTube, built the vintage-looking radio around a Raspberry Pi Zero W 2, a low-cost single-board computer (SBC) that packs a Broadcom BCM2710A1 with four Arm Cortex-A53 cores, 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM, and a few other odds and ends.

Other parts include...

• Pimoroni Audio Amp SHIM
• Adafruit PowerBoost 1000C
• Proto Board for RPi-Zero
• Turning Potentiometer
• On/Off switch
• Micro-USB mount

The dial flips through different decades of music and radio content, including old commercials and other bits fit for a fix of nostalgia. Almost all of the content was sourced from Australia's National Film and Sound Archive, save for the last 'decade' on the dial, which plays "family-specific audio such as voices from deceased family members."

Yeah, we're not crying, you're crying. And there's a good chance the modder's pops will drip a few tears down his cheek after receiving this gift, too. It's not clear how many hours of content are loaded onto this thing, but we reckon it's quite a bit, especially considering the numerous decades it covers.

This isn't the first project of its kind. There have been many others, like this one that was posted to Reddit a couple of years ago—it spans the 1920s to the 2020s, with each decade streaming its own playlist from Spotify.

They are all neat in their own way, just this one hits you in the feels, given the timing (right before Christmas) and the personal touch. If you're interested in making one in similar fashion, visit the project's GitHub page.