Adding wifi control to my Beogram RX2… sanity check my approach?

[Wells Workshop]

I found a beautiful Beogram RX2 on eBay last year, and have been using it with the handful of Sonos speakers throughout my house. It’s fun to be able to listen to a record outside, from the turntable in my office.

One thing that’s bugged me is that I can’t start the turntable from another room like I can with my other digital music sources. Likewise, if I pause the sonos to answer the phone or something, the record will continue to play through and will sometimes run out completely before I unpause. First world problems I know, but it gave me an idea…

I set out to build a small add-in board that adds start/stop/pause control to the Beogram via a micro-sized wifi-connected board called an ESP32, as well as pass through the turntable’s current state to make it ‘smart’. I’m calling it “Beonos” (a lazy mashup of Beogram and Sonos… what, naming things is hard!)

Where I’ve landed after a lot of reading schematics and a few dead ends… I’m tapping the control lines going into the deck’s microprocessor so start/stop/lift are controlled the same way the front panel ‘keyboard’ would. The RX2’s circuitry would be otherwise completely unmodified. It plugs in between the main circuit board and the keyboard attached to the top shell to ‘press’ the various buttons.

Anything on the RX2 (or similar era beograms) specifically I should leave well alone? I’m treating the tonearm servo and the cartridge as sacred and staying out of both… and from the schematics it seems like the control system is pretty much separate.

Has anyone here done anything similar with Datalink and regretted or preferred it? I looked at going that way but it seemed more complicated than it was worth, but I’m not sure I was right.

Happy to share more board photos once I’ve got it a little tidier. Mostly I just wanted to share my little project and see if there’s anything obivous I’m missing.

Cheers!

Favourite Product: Beogram RX2

[TK]

Your approach seems quite sane given the Beogram you have.  AFAIK, the RX2 microprocessor was not encoded with Datalink ’86, so the “keypress simulation” you’ve employed is an effective alternative, provided you’ve taken care to verify that you are protecting the microprocessor’s circuitry.  Alternatively you could spring for a TX2 or other 59XX tangential Beogram (maybe $150 w/o cartridge), and tap into the Datalink control line, which is an alternate approach.   This would offer similar control to what you have, and adds a few extra commands, with a few bonuses such as status updates (“Playing”, “Paused”, “No Media”, etc) but does require a microcontroller that can handle a 5V circuit. An ESP32 is a 3.3V microcontroller, AFAIK.

 

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