libbymiller / neue-radio

Radiodan Evolution

Experiment for a new radio prototyping kit for the next radiodan.

See here for some context.

What is this?

A basic sketch of how things could work if a headless web browser instance was used to playback audio on an embedded linux device like the Raspberry Pi.

This forked version of Andrew Nicolaou's work adds websockets to connect the public and private radio pages.

See INSTALL-PIZERO.md for detailed instructions.

How does it work?

Apps

An app is split into 2 distinct parts: private and public. The private part is a web page that is loaded by a headless browser instance running on the Raspberry Pi and so executes in that context.

Any audio that's played from this private webpage will play out the Pi's audio port i.e. the headphone jack, the HDMI port or a connected USB audio card.

The public web page can be loaded by a browser on another machine and is used as the remote control for any apps.

The private and public parts of an app are automatically mounted by their id on different ports. So, for an app named radio, the private part will be mounted at http://localhost:5001/radio and the public part will be available at http://localhost:5000/radio.

On a radiodan system, we proxy port 5000 to port 80 so you load the radio app's public page at http://raspberrypi.local/radio.

Mounting

In this demo implementation, the app is contained in the radio directory. Any files in radio/public are available on http://raspberrypi.local/radio so it's best to have a page called radio/public/index.html containing the entry point to the remote control. The file radio/index.html is the page loaded by the headless web browser. Any files in radio/ will be accessible by the private web page.

Communication between private and public

Because it's just 2 web pages, the idea is that browser APIs must be used to communicate between the two pages such as window.postMessage.

Manager

The manager is responsible for starting and stopping all radio apps. It's a webpage that's the first page loaded on the internal chromium browser instance. It mounts the private part of each app in an iframe.

Debugging

A remote web inspector is available on localhost port 5222. This isn't accessible from other machines on the network. You can use ssh on the Pi to make this available externally.

In another session on the Pi run the following command:

ssh -L 0.0.0.0:9223:localhost:9222 localhost -N

Visit http://raspberrypi.local:9223 on another machine to access the web inspector where all pages are accessible.

Physical interface

A very rough implementation for controlling connected lights and buttons exists in physical. When run it connects to the peripherals specified in physical/config/physical-config.json. The Buttons and RGB LEDs map onto the Johnny-Five API. The Rotary Encoders are provided by the andrewn/raspi-rotary-encoder package.

The physical server listens for WebSocket connections on port 5100 and emits and receives simple events to all connected clients.

At the moment, the messages are quite low-level. Further work would be to wrap the messages in a simple library that make listing available components and controlling and listening to them a bit easier.

A simple demo page at http://localhost:5100 allows limited interaction.

What does it do?

This initial implementation doesn't do very much. radio/index.html plays a live HLS radio stream using HLS.js in a webpage.

In a future version it would be good to present a simple remote control that allows you to play/pause the stream.

Installation on a Pi

Install chromium and xvfb:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rpi-chromium-mods xvfb

Install the manager and example app:

mkdir /opt/radiodan
git clone https://github.com/andrewn/neue-radio rde
cd rde/manager
npm install --production
cd ..

Install the physical interface manager:

cd physical
JOBS=MAX npm install --production # use all cores
cd ..

Install scripts to manage processes:

sudo cp systemd/* /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start manager

You should hear some radio playing out of the default speakers!

Run on boot:

sudo systemctl enable manager
sudo systemctl enable manager-web-server
sudo systemctl enable physical