Older hackers will remember that a crystal set radio receiver was often one of the first projects attempted. Times have changed, but there’s still something magical about gathering invisible signals from the air and listening to the radio on a homemade receiver. [mircemk] has brought the idea right up to date by building an FM radio with an OLED display, controlled with a rotary encoder.
The design is fairly straightforward, based as it is on another project that [mircemk] found on another site, but the build looks very slick and would take pride of place on any hacker’s workbench. An Arduino Due forms the heart of the project, controlling a TEA5767 module, an SH1106 128×64 pixel OLED display and a rotary encoder. The sound signal is passed through an LM4811 headphone amplifier for private listening, and a PAM8403 Class D audio amplifier for the built-in loudspeaker. The enclosure is made from PVC panels, and accented with colored adhesive tape for style.
It’s easier than ever before to quickly put together projects like this by connecting pre-built modules and downloading code from the Internet, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile way to improve your skills and make some useful devices like this one. There are so many resources available to us these days and standing on the shoulders of giants has always been a great way to see farther.
We’ve shown some other radio projects using Arduinos and the TEA5767 IC in the past, such as this one on a tidy custom PCB, and this one built into an old radio case.
Nice build, but a much cheaper Arduino board could be used. And the sources would probably need no change or very small change.
Coulda used a ZN414 :-D
The TEA5767 and it’s pin and comman comatible clone RDA5807 are hilariously cheap.
Bare chip cost is single digit cents even in low volumes.
So one can add an FM receiver to anything with an audio amplifier and something antenna like.
But it is a bit soulless compared to ZN414/MK484 or the currently available derivate TA7642.
One the other hand, there’s not much AM broadcast left in many countries and FM receivers are harder to build, even if it’s sometihng TDA7000 or TA2003 based.
Chinese site? .ch is Switzerland not China.
Oops, I’ve changed the wording. Thanks.
How to build a radio without learning anything about resonance and oscillating circuits…
And that’s great as learning this part is the hardest part about RF tech. ;-)
It provides functionality to those who do like to tinker, but don’t have any background in electronics design.
I do get where you come from with this comment, but some people don’t want to learn all background on how a signal is created, modulated, transferred, propagated, received, amplified, demodulated, converted to sound, etc. (you probably get my point).
Last time I was at a JOTI event as a radio amateur (and in this case Wi-Fi techie), some of the young people were just like “Why should I use a radio to contact somebody with great effort while I can just send a whole movie to somebody on WhatsApp?”.
What about a hdradio?!?
In the 80s and 90s when I was a kid there were plenty of AM crystal radio kits and plans. But nothing so simple for FM unless it had a “black-box” pcb. What kid in those days listened to AM though? It’s too bad Billy DIY wasn’t around yet, there might have been more hobbyists inspired by FM. https://www.youtube.com/c/cheungbx
These days.. well.. I don’t think anyone is going to manage a crystal internet radio box.
I think it looks great. Having manual search, auto search and volume on one rotary switch is very cool. I’ve been making variations on Stefan Wagner’s FM Pocket Radio https://hackaday.io/project/186182-fm-pocket-radio. I’ve got the radio bug atm :)