Turn Your Raspberry Pi into a DIY Internet Radio

[Music] [Applause] radio has transformed in the last 10 years in the way it's changed all audio visual and print media it's gone from being a broadcast medium harnessing millions of dollars worth of hardware and stuff to something the average person can do on their own using a laptop this democratization has added to the stack of stuff that you can listen to and on what personalizing and tailoring what used to be called radio into something called internet radio the main casualty of this democratization process has of course been the actual radio hardware a device separate from your computer or phone which sat on the windowsill or off to the side of your room and when you turned it on it played radio shows it was a one job tool turn it on and music comes out simple old school entertainment on demand radios are still made but they're seen as niche devices for old people and you can't get any old internet radio stations on them they can only play what is broadcast on the old radio waves these days some are also bluetooth speakers in a vague concession to modernity but this doesn't give you the same feeling as the old-school radio and still involves your phone being charged and paired to the speaker device which i don't know for me takes a bit of the shine off it it's also nice to have an independently powered device taking care of radio playback as it means you say battery life on your phone or tablet plus it means you can use your phone while the radio is on so having established all that the big question is can you have a nostalgic radio experience while still having the best that the modern lushly populated internet radio world has to offer well if you've read the title of this video before you press play you already know the answer to that yes you can by way of the raspberry pi in this video i'll be talking about how you acquire the basic electronics what basic equipment and software you'll need to get started how to get to the point of putting it all together as a playable unit and in what ways you can finish off the build with a good case to make it pleasing and cool to look at or of course you can just box it in roughly and walk away there are many ways to go this is your radio you get to make it look any way you want basic requirements of course you need to have a raspberry pi pretty much any one will do but obviously you may have to add adapters to get some sound out of it in some cases pi zero i'm looking at you while you can make this device only a temporary build and therefore keep the pi free for other projects i fully recommend that you use an old pie that you have lying around and build it into a box as a permanent device so it's always up together and ready to go in the spirit of the old-time radios we are trying to emulate what else do you need although the sound coming out the audio port or the hdmi port is perfectly serviceable it's much better to add an actual dac or digital to audio converter for proper high fidelity sound you can get away with the cheap usb one which only costs a few quid but much better results can be derived from introducing a proper hifi dac into the equation you also need a reliable ethernet connection or wi-fi by the way the rest is pretty much optional you can add an amplifier to the internal circuit and even dedicated speakers and we'll go into that in a little bit at the end if you don't want to add an amplification subsystem into your build then an external amp will more than suffice getting started the first step is to choose your platform for radio streaming and there are a few of those around the best and easiest one i could find when i set out to build these radios for myself was a thing called pi music box it pretty much seemed to have everything i was looking for this largely plug and go solution solves a few of the common problems and makes some of the tricky decisions for you and makes it mostly a simple case of burning an sd card with the software and sparking up the pie of course it's a little more complicated than that depending on your setup but this is a firm basis for our little internet radio project so the first step is to go to the pi music box site www.pymusicbox.com [Music] and pick up the disc image containing the software there is a great walkthrough of installation on there as well as instructions in several languages scroll down to the part labeled download and get the sd card image once that is downloaded you have to burn it to an sd card ready for installation on your pi use your sd card burner of choice i use baleno etcher and burn the image to the card making a bootable sd for you to insert into your raspberry pi now the software is designed to run headerless this means you don't need a monitor attached and you don't need a keyboard to run or configure the software in fact there's a remote control web interface you can get to once the software is up and running you can access the interface and add radio stations to the device and change stations all through a browser on a phone or a computer next you need a dac dac to the future the question of what dac you use depends to a certain extent on your budget and the kind of pie you are using the pi zero has no audio output so it requires a hat or an adapter of some kind to take the audio out of the pipe into any kind of speaker you can do this in a number of ways you can add a dac to the usb port or if you're wanting something a bit more gorgeous audio wise you can add a hi-fi dac that fits onto the gpio port and takes audio right out of the board and onto a pair of ports that you can attach to an amp you can also if you want to find add-ons which not only add a dac but an app so all you have to do is add a pair of speakers the basic dac is a cheap digital to audio converter which adds a headphone or speaker out and a mic in socket to your pi via a usb port these can be bought on amazon or ebay for a few pounds or in some cases less than a pound the sound quality reflects that price and it's better than nothing but not what you call hifi especially if you funnel it into a nice amp and a pair of giant speakers there are higher quality dacs that you can buy which are purpose built for the pie the hifiberry line is a good place to start but as they are high quality components they are a little pricey turn on the radio so there it is the most simple version of the pi internet radio slip in the sd card connect a dac to the usb ports add an ethernet cable plugged into your router or wi-fi then power up the pi plug a 3.5 mil stereo audio cable from the headphone port of the dac to the input on an amplifier connected to a speaker or the audio in on a bluetooth or smart speaker and you're ready to go once you've booted the pie you just wait for a few seconds and then access the web interface of the music box through your browser by going to musicbox.local in the default skin adding stations is easy type in the url of the station and name it and then press enter the station should begin streaming and play through the speaker either you can adjust the volume on the amplifier or you can just adjust the volume on music box via the web interface so that's it you're done oh except your radio is a bunch of loose circuit boards lying on the table and not a nice neat box with everything inside so what can you do about that make it groovy well the first thing you can do is get an official case for your raspberry pi this neatens things up considerably or if your radio is a bunch of components stuck together you could use an electronics project box next level of course is boxes which accommodate a pi and a gpio mounted dac for compact hi-fi sound after that we're into the wild west of making your own enclosures or in some cases repurposing existing cases or enclosures and bending them to our own will there is a group of people out there on the internet who specialize in making old-time wooden radios into modern internet radios this includes using the existing speakers and using additional electronics and encoders to make the rotary knobs from the original radio affect the features of the pi radio within this is advanced stuff but not outside of your capabilities if you read up on it the premier site for this kind of radio hacking tomfoolery is bob rathbone's raspberry pi internet radio page the link in the description this contains all the resources you'll need to turn your grandma's giant mid-century wooden stereogram into the world's biggest spotify player there are a lot of images of past user projects on this page as well which might inspire you to make your own vintage internet radio all in one box solution having the pi in the power supply and the amp all in one box is a way some people like to go this involves a little bit of electronics know-how and could be considered an advanced skill obviously the main stumbling block is that amplifiers customarily power up around 9 to 12 volts but the pi only takes a little over 5 volts having all these things in a power chain present some interesting challenges especially if you are an electronics idiot like me look here i can solder and i have plenty of experience soldering devices but i'm not sure i could do it well if my life depended on it i prefer connecting devices rather than soldering them from scratch there are however some helpful components that you can get which makes this process a lot easier if you do some research and shop around i got a gizmo which takes a 12 volt supply of those kind those nice new class d or class t amplifiers use and hives off a bit of it to the 5 volt micro usb plug so you can comfortably power an amp and a pi off the same juice it's all about how you connect things and this little box goes quite a long way to helping you get all your eggs in one box now originally when i started making these radios i wanted one for upstairs for the home office bolted to the underside of the desk and another one downstairs which was a bit more portable so here's what i did case study pi 2 and cheap dac the upstairs one used a raspberry pi 2 an ethernet cable to stream in the shows and a cheap little plastic deck from amazon the quality of these are really variable in fact some of them either don't work or buzz horribly but once you get a good one the sound quality you get out of them is okay tolerable especially if you have some hearing loss like me anyway there are some people who are really picky about top quality audio and this is not the internet radio for them assembly of this version was quite routine and quite quick download the sd card image and burn it onto a full size sd card or micro sd in an adapter as the old pi 2 uses this larger form factor once you have that you can start assembling the radio put the pi in a suitable case now fortunately for me when the pi 2 was new i bought a couple of cases so i was okay but you can still find them online if you look fixing the case to the desk was a simple matter of making a paper template of where the screw holes were on the back and then using that to drive a couple of screws with the right size heads into the desk near the ethernet hub once it was ready i could put in the sd card and insert the dac into the usb then add the ethernet cable and power cable and hang it under the desk it's handy if you can add a usb switch to this circuit as well as this will prevent you having to unplug the power all the time when you want to reset the radio this is a good lesson for life unplugging the power tends to lift the pipe off the screws and that's just plain annoying i just put a blob of blue tack on the back and stuck it to the part of the desk i can get to easily case study pi01 and hi-fi dac the downstairs one was a little more complex i wanted this one to be a bit more portable use wi-fi and have a more expensive dac all of this was all very well but the pyre had was a zero and the early one without the wi-fi or bluetooth which raised some interesting questions firstly there was no way to get internet into it without wi-fi and there was no ethernet port either and only one usb port i could add more usb ports but that added to the size and i wanted it as small as i could with if possible no cutting or soldering i figured i could run the pi with a usb wi-fi dongle if it was small enough and the audio could come out of a pricey hifi dac that fits on the gpio port keeping all the size down all i'd need to do then was cram it all inside a project box i also had the bright idea to run the power into audio outs headphone and line level to external sockets and mount them on the outside of the box it was a much tighter fit than i would have liked this would have been all a lot smaller and neater if i'd have just soldered short extenders onto the pi directly but no i had to be lazy and just order short extension leads from amazon serves me right but it works and it can run off a usb cable connected to a wall socket or an external battery if necessary the only limitation is that it has to be in wi-fi range so depending on location i can even use it outside in the garden oh and also i forgot to mention as the pi music box platform is based on mopidi you can use any mpd client to remote control your radios and these come in all shapes and sizes and all platforms even ios and android okay that's it i hope you enjoyed this little romp through making internet radios really i've only just scratched the surface here but i'll do my best to add lots of useful links to the description so you can go down this rabbit hole in any direction that you like as always thanks so much for watching that's all for now i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Make Tech Easier

Views: 2,475

Keywords: tech tips, mte, maketecheasier, internet radio pi, internet radio raspberry pi, internet radio setup, internet radio pi 4, internet radio raspberry pi 4, internet radio pi zero, diy internet radio raspberry pi, raspberry pi radio, raspberry pi radio transmitter, raspberry pi radio scanner, raspberry pi radio receiver, raspberry pi radio project

Id: OeVuiITFTtY

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021