He shoved a raspberry pi inside a 2003 ipod and made it stream spotify
The click wheel still purrs, the white polycarbonate never cracked, yet every circuit that once spun a 1.8-inch hard drive is now landfill. In its place: a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W the size of a stick of gum, hot-wired to a 23-year-old chassis. Reddit builder potatojemsas calls the mutant PiPod 3G; I call it the moment Apple’s nostalgia became a trojan horse for open hardware.
Why the third-gen ipod became the perfect host
Apple’s 2003 flagship was never loved the way the Classic 5G or the Mini were. The chrome-back, all-touch façade looked futuristic, but the 30-pin Dock Connector was a one-night stand: abandoned after two years. That obscurity is gold. Empty units sell for pocket change, the plastic pops open without heat guns, and the 2.4-inch cavity swallows modern lithium cells whole. Translation: zero milling, zero 3-D-printed spacers, zero Industrial Design degree required.
Inside, the Pi Zero 2 W shoulders the entire workload—Wi-Fi stack, Bluetooth audio, 320×240 TFT driver—while a MPR121 capacitive controller translates swirling thumbs into I²C packets. The original copper pads still sit where Jobs left them; they just report to Linux now. A 2300 mAh Li-ion cell feeds the SoC through a Wemos D1 Mini charger board, good for six hours of lossless streaming before the wheel goes dark.
Streaming, plex and a terminal window in your pocket
Pair the PiPod to a headset and it behaves like any modern DAP. The twist: switch to hotspot mode, open Plexamp in the browser, and the entire home library floods in at 320 kbps. Plug a USB-C keyboard and the same device drops to a shell prompt; vim runs fine if your thumbs are patient. potatojemsas swears he compiled ffmpeg on a train from Berlin to Prague just to prove the gimmick works.
The BOM tops out at €87 if you splurge on a Class-10 SD card and a faux-chrome replacement back. Compare that with the €499 Apple asks for an iPod Touch that still can’t play FLAC. The economics are rude.
Next step: a dac that punches above phone-grade
The onboard PWM audio is clean enough for the subway, but audiophiles will scream murder. A PCM5102A DAC board is already on the breadboard, wired to the Pi’s I²S header. Once the new PCB arrives—gold-plated, 0.8 mm thickness, routed in KiCad—the 3.5 mm jack returns to its rightful hole, this time pushing 112 dB SNR instead of the Wolfson nostalgia trip.
Files are already stacking up on GitHub. Twelve forks, three Spanish translations, one guy in Seoul laser-cutting acrylic shells for the Mini crowd. The landfill is fighting back.
Apple retired the iPod because the iPhone ate its lunch. potatojemsas just showed the carcass still has teeth.