benchly / piradio

Piradio is an internet radio streaming client for embedded devices (Raspberry Pi).

Piradio

Piradio powers a streaming internet radio client for the "Pirate Radio" hardware sold by Pimoroni: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pirate-radio-pi-zero-w-project-kit or any kit based on their Phat Beat DAC / Audio Amplifier and a Raspberry Pi.

Features are the ones provided by mpd:

• it retains the radio station that was playing after turning off / on the device and also the volume.
• it has a number of interfaces, currently on this image there is a web interface and a console one.
• managing your radio stations can be done from the interface (add stream and delete buttons).
• physical buttons on the Phat Beat do what is expected of them
• LEDs are used as a vumeter

how to create the image

• First clone this repository with git clone [email protected]:pirateradiohack/PiRadio.git.
• Configure your wifi settings: copy the file called config.example to config and edit this last one. You will see where to enter your wifi name, password and country. All 3 settings are necessary. Your changes to this file will be kept in future updates.
• Optionally configure your radio stations: If you create a file called my-playlist.m3u with your own list of internet radio streams, it will be installed. If not, then you can always add stations in the web interface.
• Then build the image. (You can see the whole guide on the official RaspberryPi repo: https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen). I find it easier to use docker (obviously you need to have docker installed on your system) as there is nothing else to install, just run one command from this directory: ./build-docker.sh. That's it. On my computer it takes between 15 and 30 minutes. And at the end you should see something like: Done! Your image(s) should be in deploy/
  If you don't see that, it's probably that the build failed. It happens to me sometimes for no reason and I find that just re-launching the build with CONTINUE=1 ./build-docker.sh finishes the build correctly.

burn the image to a SD card

You should find the newly created image in the deploy directory.

graphically

For a user friendly experience you can try etcher to flash the image to the SD card.

manually

On linux (and it probably works on Mac too) an example to get it on the SD card would be:

• First clone this repository with git clone --recursive [email protected]:pirateradiohack/PiRadio.git.
  (Please note the --recursive here is important to get all the code, there is a submodule present.)
• Configure your radio stations: Pimoroni maintains a set of default internet radio streams. You can see them in the file example.m3u. This file will be installed if nothing else is supplied. If you create a file called my-playlist.m3u with your own list of internet radio streams, this file will be used instead.
• Configure your wifi settings: copy the file called config.example to config and edit this last one. You will see where to enter your wifi name, password and country. All 3 settings are necessary.
• Then build the image. (You can see the whole guide on the official RaspberryPi repo: https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen). I find it easier to use docker as there is nothing else to install, just run one command from this directory: ./build-docker.sh. That's it. On my computer it takes between 15 and 30 minutes. And at the end you should see something like: Done! Your image(s) should be in deploy/
  If you don't see that, it's probably that the build failed. It happens to me sometimes for no reason and I find that just re-launching the build with CONTINUE=1 ./build-docker.sh finishes the build correctly.

burn the image to a SD card

You should find the newly created image in the deploy directory. On linux an example to get it on the SD card would be:
sudo dd bs=4M if=deploy/2019-05-23-Piradio-lite.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 conv=fsync
(of course you need to replace /dev/mmcblk0 with the path to your own SD card. You can find it with the command lsblk -f) Those settings are recommended by the RaspberryPi instructions.

controlling your radio via web interface

You can control your radio via web interface: try to open http://radio.local in a web browser. If that does not work then find its IP and in your browser enter http://[IP of your radio].

If you prefer the command line, you can ssh into your radio (you need to set that up in the config file before building the image) and then use ncmpcpp to get a nice terminal interface (see some screenshots here: https://rybczak.net/ncmpcpp/screenshots/).

ready-to-flash image

Out of security concerns I recommend you read the code and build the image yourself.

But, if you prefer to trust a stranger on the Internet with your Pirate Radio, for your convenience you will find the latest image pre-compiled here: 2020-07-28-Piradio-image.zip.

Just flash it and configure your wifi. You can also optionally configure your own radio streams playlist.

The files to edit are:

• wifi: /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf (edit this file)
• (optionally) playlist: /home/pi/.config/vlc/playlist.m3u (create this file)

You can edit them before or after flashing the image:

• before flashing you can mount the .img.
  With a modern operating system you probably just have to click the .img.
  With Linux you can use kpartx (from the multipath-tools package) to be able to mount the partition directly: sudo kpartx -a path/to/2019-05-23-Piradio-lite.img followed by sudo mount /dev/mapper/loop0p2 tmp/ -o loop,rw
  (you will need to create the mount directory first and check what loop device you are using with sudo kpartx -l path/to/2019-05-23-Piradio-lite.img). Then you can edit the files mentionned above. And sudo umount tmp.
  You are safe to flash the image.
• after flashing your operating system probably automounts the partitions.

how it is built

The image is built with the official RaspberryPi.org tool (https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen) to build a Raspbian lite system with all the software needed to have a working internet radio stream client. It uses mpd.

motivation

The official documentation from Pimoroni has some instructions and examples to make an internet streaming client for the hardware: https://github.com/pimoroni/phat-beat/tree/master/projects/vlc-radio. It works fine and is a good source of inspiration.

But those examples assume an already installed OS and run some scripts on top of it. I personally find it more convenient when it comes to embedded devices to just burn an image to an SD card. Also, the provided software in the examples works fine, but comes in a format that I find hard to tinker with. I tried to use an approach based on provisionning an image instead in order to make it a good ground for hacking.

The first version of this project used the official scripts from Pimoroni. If you want that, you can find it here: https://github.com/pirateradiohack/PiRadio/tree/2019-05-25-PiRadio

Issues and pull requests are welcome.