[Shaun Gehring] wanted an Internet radio player. Although he did have some troubles along the way, the final project turned out very well. Housed inside this case which used to house a spindle of bland CDs is a Raspberry Pi that plays Pandora radio and serves as an AirPlay receiver.
The GPIO header of the RPi makes this project a lot easier. [Shaun] used Adafruit’s breakout board to solder connections for the six buttons and the character LCD screen. Plug some speakers into the audio jack and the hardware end of the deal is finished. The software side of things is very similar to the BeagleBone Pandora player we looked at in September. It uses a Linux distribution (Rasbian Weezy) and the Pianobar package.
Pianobar is very versatile. You can control it using a First-In First-Out file. Once [Shaun] figured out how to use mkfifo to set up the file, he was able to control it from a script by monitor button presses and echoing the associated command to the FIFO. The finishing touch was to add AirPlay support via the shairport package.
Good job on your project. Coincidentally I’m working on documenting my standalone raspberry pi pandora player. I use Dsniff to listen for the URL that Pianobar gets the song from, I then download the song with Wget, and then I save the mp3 on the SDCARD. Then, when the Rasberry PI gets out of range of WIFI, it switches over to play the saved songs. It always plays no matter what.
Your project sounds equally useful! I hope I read about it somewhere, once completed.
That is the cool thing about this stuff. We can all tackle the same problem 100 different ways. I look forward to reading how you did it.
I agree with fritoeata, please make the project!
If you’re connecting to HiFi speakers you might want to use a USB sound card since the analog audio on the Pi isn’t very good quality.
I am glad to see you benefited from my Instructable – but am a little confused, since I submitted my project here a month ago. The addition of Airplay is a cool feature though. Anyone who wants to see the project which this one was based off http://www.instructables.com/id/Pandoras-Box-An-Internet-Radio-player-made-with/
I would suggest adding a bluetooth USB dongle so you could use it as Bluetooth speakers and maybe use a bluetooth remote with it.
It looks like my own project for CMUS (my audio player). I didn’t use any fancy airplay though!
Link to my project: http://mupuf.org/blog/2011/06/14/an_arduino-based_frontend_to_my_audio-player_cmus/