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.

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WiFi radio with LCD Finding a good, cheap sound card should have been as easy as ordering the one mentioned on the mighty ohm for $10, but I thought I’d save eight bucks and order the cheapest possible one on ebay. When it arrived, the right channel was totally non-functional and to say the sound quality was poor would be an understatement. It was impressive though, that anyone could manufacture and deliver to my door a brand new USB sound card even counting the defects for only two dollars. But that’s all beside the point.

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3D sound USB sound card 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.

Buffalo LinkStation Duo The first thing I did after joining this device to my wifi network was telnet in and change my password. Now the project that I’ve been following up to this point is mainly to be used for playing internet radio stations as I understand it. My wifi radio is going to be used for that too, but also for playing selections from my own music library. I plan to get one of these Buffalo 1TB Linkstation NAS devices and put all my media on it and leave it down in the basement. I’ve read that you can really customize these devices, but all I need to do is add an ssh server to it. Then I can mount the whole filesystem to a folder on my wifi radio and have access to a full terabyte of storage space.

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OpenWRT wifi radio + LCD 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.

mightyOhm has a good series of blog entries for doing almost exactly what I want to do. I skipped the first bit about hooking up a terminal because I don’t have a TTL-USB device lying around and flashed the router with openwrt. As I found out, TTL is not RS-232. You can’t just connect an RS-232 cable to your PC and solder the other end to the serial pins on your router. I do have a TTL LCD panel that I picked up last year on eBay (I’ve been planning to build a device like this for some time). Modern Device has these 20x4 character blue LCDs with a TTL serial interface for around $30. Jeff built his own, but he’s also an electrical engineer.

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