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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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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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.
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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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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