Lunchbox Internet Radio Guide

As an engineer or a crazy techie, you must have opened up various electronic gadgets and then try to reassemble it. I am pretty sure, you also have attempted to create something innovative from the garage. Well, those activities are the part of your beginner stage. This article, which is posted by a raspberry engineer is posted under Radio Projects, where a radio is made into a lunchbox!

Different from your earlier reassembling activities, this project is at an advanced stage, which contains codes and other serious technical stuff. This homemade radio has 6 buttons and a 20×4 LCD screen, which contains “ON” and “OFF” button along with “BACK”, “PLAY”, “STOP” and “NEXT” buttons. The device is connected to the internet via Wi-Fi and with the help of USB hub connected through a Pi-Supply, the radio is powered.

A USB sound card is used as the quality of the on board is low at best and can run it through the home stereo. As USB sound card drives out a much-improved line volume, it is convenient to switch from CD to the Raspberry Pi.

The materials required for this project includes Raspberry Pi (Model B rev 2), A powered USB hub, USB sound card, Wi-Fi Dongle, An SD Card of 4gb or more, 1k and 10k Resistors, 20×4 LCD with a Hitachi HD44780 chip, 6x momentary switches, 2 variable resistors for contrast and backlight adjustment, Wires, USB cables, A lunch box and a Humble Pi.

Lunchbox Internet Radio Guide (Image Courtesy: projects-raspberry.com)

The Raspberry Pi is setup by installing Raspbian (Wheezy) followed by PuTTYI. As the raspberry pi is connected via Ethernet and turned on, the router starts searching the IP address of the Raspberry Pi. Next, the PuTTYis used to log in via SSH. All the above information is part of any beginner’s guide and can be found easily on the internet. But make sure not to plug theWi-Fi dongle now as the device might avoid using Ethernet.

Most of this work is assembled from the internet and is based on bits and pieces from other people. As mentioned by the raspberry engineer, the major influence for this project was Meistervision (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM4n2OtwGl0) who has wonderfully explained the process of building a radio.