Nabaztag Radio

What it isA dead smart-object, brought back

The Nabaztag was one of the first "smart" objects (2005) — a plastic rabbit with motorized ears. Its cloud died long ago; the open-source pynab firmware on a hidden Raspberry Pi Zero W brings it back to do three things:

How it worksSound in, dance out

Music streams over Wi-Fi to spotifyd, which plays it through the sound HAT:

On every track change, spotifyd also fires a hook → which asks the nabd daemon to move the ears. That branch is the whole charm of the thing.

The daemonWhat spotifyd actually is

spotifyd is an open-source, headless Spotify Connect client — a lightweight Rust daemon (built on librespot) that turns the rabbit into a speaker your Spotify app can stream to. No browser, no GUI, no keyboard: it just sits on the Pi waiting to be picked.

How it's picked

It advertises itself over the LAN with zeroconf discovery, so it pops up in any first-party Spotify app's Connect menu as Nabaztag. Activate it once — no password stored, since Spotify dropped password auth for old librespot.

Where it lives

Binary at /usr/local/bin/spotifyd, config at /etc/spotifyd.conf (audio out to plughw:CARD=tagtagtagsound), run as the spotifyd.service systemd unit that auto-starts on boot.

The wiggle hook

Its on_song_change_hook option runs a script on every play/track-change event — that's the thread we pull to make the ears dance via nabd.

Why this exact build

The prebuilt v0.3.3 armv6-slim release is the newest that runs on the Pi Zero W's ancient ARMv6 + glibc 2.28. Newer builds and raspotify all need libraries too fresh for end-of-life Buster.

See it in actionThe ears, live

The rabbit doing its thing:

Under the hoodThree constraints worth knowing

An old, tiny CPU

The Pi Zero W is ARMv6 with glibc 2.28, so it runs the exact prebuilt spotifyd v0.3.3 armv6-slim release binary — downloaded, not compiled on the Pi — and anything newer won't start.

No MP3 decoder

End-of-life Buster can't install one and aplay only plays WAV, so MP3s are converted to WAV first (on the Mac) before playback.

Ears over a socket

nabd speaks JSON over TCP on 127.0.0.1:10543; sending {"type":"ears",…} moves them. The wiggler fails silently, since it's spawned on every song.

The repoFour small scripts

Each is a self-contained backup of what runs on the device (in src/):

Running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W (Raspbian Buster) with pynab · full setup notes in the README.