The Noisy Brick
Friday, Apr 24, 2026 | 2 minutes read | Update at Friday, Apr 24, 2026
Introducing the Noisy Brick, a custom portable music player, the third item in the Brick Series, where I badly design and assemble custom devices.
Project Link : https://github.com/sysangl/noisy-brick
I like music. I don’t like streaming music. So, I want to make a device that lets me listen to my music offline. I could just download songs to my phone, but that can be distracting, and also isn’t fun.
The basic requirements for this project is :
- Long battery life >8 hours per charge
- Easy navigation of menus
- Fully custom shuffle of tracks
- Small and lightweight
- Cost effective
Components
For my basic functions, there is only a few things I need.
- A charging module
- Rechargable Battery
- Microcontroller
- SD Card reader
- DAC Module
- Audio Jack
- Screen
- Some buttons
From that list I already had somee things lying around.
- A 0.96" OLED I2C screen
- Different sized LiPo batteries
- An ESP32 Devkit V4
- And various buttons
For the other components I did some quick research, I found that the best budget DAC was a PCM5102A module with an audio jack, and I got some generic charging modules and an SD card reader. The total for these components was around AUD $7.
In total, the cost of the electronic components was around AUD $25.
And now, I just have to wait for everything to arrive.
