Release

24 Dec 2013 by Libby Miller

Radiodan is ready for release. Well, like any release, I feel like it’s not ready - but sometimes you just have to get it out of the door, even if it’s Christmas eve.

Thanks to Andrew’s work on the radiodan example app and physical interface, and Dan’s work on the Radiodan core library you can now:

• download a 2G SD (580 MB zipped) minimal Raspian-plus-Radiodan card image
• put it on an SD card in the usual way
• or - try the experimental Radiodan-only NOOBS installation (360MB zipped) and drag and drop it onto a formated SD card
• put the card in the Pi, add Ethernet and a speaker, and plug it in

Then you can:

• listen to BBC radio, controlled via web page as long as you are on the same network
• avoid tracks and programmes
• optionally you can also add some buttons and dials and a box

If you want to make it wifi enabled:

• plug a USB wifi with RT5370 chipset, into your Pi and reboot
• optionally: make a cup of tea
• connect to its wifi (“radiodan_configuration”)
• go to any webpage (or wait for the captive portal, if you are on a Mac) and tell it your wifi password
• reboot

More detailed step by step instructions are here.

Be warned that is alpha software. However, if anyone does try it, we’d really like to hear any comments you have, good or bad, and I’ll be around on @libbymiller or libby@nicecupoftea.org if you have any questions.

We’d like to thank Nick Humfrey for all his help with the metadata aspects of it.

Our experience writing this has given us ideas about how to do it better, so in the next few months there will be a Radiodan 2 with a slightly different architecture and probably using the excellent NOOBS

As ever, we are working in public - you can see all our code on github, and there are various documents on this blog.