If you've been following along with my wifi radio posts, you may recall my problem of storage for the platform. I chose an ultra-low power and nearly zero storage device for my music collection because I planned to buy an external storage device and serve music from that device. I still think that's a good idea, but I'm too cheap to spring for the kind of device I really want. So I've been experimenting with cloud storage which has a number of big advantages which I won't get into here.

In part 1 of this series, I took an Asus router and loaded openwrt onto it. I added an LCD display and connected it to the serial port on the router board. At this point, I have a low-power, small form factor computer that I can customize to my heart's content. As far as I/O, the computer still has its original wifi antenna, 5 wired LAN interfaces, a serial port and a USB port. My USB sound adapter still hasn't arrived from Hong Kong, so I'm going to work on another piece of the puzzle.

I've been inspired by Jeff Keyzer to build a wifi radio. I've wanted for a long time to build a wifi radio to play internet radio and music from an arbitrary remote filesystem. The low cost of the platform he chose, the WL-520gu which I picked up for $35 shipped and is now even cheaper made the barrier to entry much lower than I had thought. So I bought one and tore out the guts as soon as it arrived.