Weekend Projects - Raspberry Pirate Radio

hi I'm Sam Freeman with make have you ever thought about becoming a pirate no not that y m type of pirate but the Builder of a pirate radio station in today's weekend project we're going to turn a Raspberry Pi into a powerful FM transmitter with enough range to cover your home DIY drive-in movie High School football stadium or bumping pirate bike parade [Music] the Pirate Radio is based on Pi FM by Oliver Matos and Oscar wiel which was revised by Ryan grassel mix engineering intern Winter Woods contributed to the project with the Pirate Radio python script which enables playback without using the command line and will handle just about any music file format automatically this is a great example of the collaborative power of the open source Community okay let's get started you'll need the following parts which can be picked up at your local radio channel and these basic tools you only need an hour or so to complete this build and it's a great first project for learning about the Raspberry Pi One Last Thing Before we start the Pirate Radio is capable of transmitting between 1 and 250 megaherz which may interfere with government Bands please stay within the FM band and always choose a frequency that's not in use to avoid interference with licensed broadcasters please check your local laws before transmitting we'll start by building the antenna all you need for a basic antenna is the length of wire we used the length of 12 gauge solid wire and it works just fine start by cutting off the end of a female jumper wire next solder it to one end of your antenna wire and insulate the connection with some heat shrink tubing you can add a bit of hot glue around the joint for additional support all it's left to do is plug it into pin four of your Raspberry Pi now it's time to upload the software to the SD card you can download the make laabs dis image from the project page our image has been optimized enables more playback options and it takes the work out of partitioning the card into system and data partitions keep in mind you can't just drag the files to your SD card it must be flashed to work if you're not familiar with this process don't worry it's easy just head over to the project page for a link to a tutorial the last step is to add your music to the SD card simply add your artist album folders to the root of the Pirate Radio partition on the SD card your music files can be nested Within These folders so there's no need to dump all your files into one mess on the root directory and with makes improvements to the code you can now use almost any music format you've got MP3 Flack wave m4a a or WMA and the code will handle them automatically once your SD card is ready you can set the broadcast frequency in the Pirate Radio config file open up the file on a text editor and you should see something like this keep in mind that FM frequency is typically range from 87.5 MHz to 108 MHz you should pick a frequency that isn't being used in your area for best results you can also configure a few other settings like Shuffle and repeat when you're done configuring the settings save the file and get ready to start broadcasting now all that's left to do is plug in your Raspberry Pi tune your FM radio to your frequency and enjoy the broadcast keep in mind that it'll take about 15 seconds to warm up once it does you should hear your music loud and clear the Pirate Radio is a clever hack of the clock signals that are generated for the GPO pins on the Raspberry Pi if you'd like to learn more about how it works head on over to the project page for all the technical details it's a great place to share projects ask questions and most importantly learn how to make your P radio portable [Music]

Channel: Make:

Views: 533,926

Keywords: diy, maker, Make, Make Magazine, electronics, Weekend Projects, RadioShack, Raspberry Pi, Pirate Radio, radio, GPIO, FM, frequency modulation, transmitter, PiFM, antenna, disk image, ISO, Win32DiskImager, PiWriter, config, playback, shuffle, broadcast

Id: CBb8BN0dqoQ

Length: 4min 23sec (263 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 06 2014