Jan Wante made this gorgeous Wifi Radio with a modern look. It is based on my original Wifi Radio tutorials.

Not content to simply duplicate my work, he added a few creative twists of his own, including a custom handmade case made of alucobond, MDF, and real wood veneer that gives his finished radio a nice, modern look. Inside, a hacked WL-520gU wireless router running OpenWrt runs the show and an ATmega microcontroller programmed with BASCOM interfaces with a rotary encoder and graphical LCD display.

The very impressive result is shown in this video:

Nice work, Jan!

@tinkernut just posted a video tutorial showing how to make a wifi radio for about $50 based on my Wifi Radio project.

Gary Dion (N4TXI) created a Wifi Radio to match his entertainment center.  His project is inspired by my original Wifi Radio project and shares several of the same parts (such as the Asus WL-520gU wireless router) and design philosophy.

Interesting features of Gary’s version of the radio:

• Very cool 4 line VFD display allows more information to be shown at once (and it’s blue!)
• AVR sends actual shell commands to the router, which allows the serial console to remain enabled for debugging/other purposes – brilliant!
• Nice custom PCB for the ATmega8 microcontroller
• Rotary encoder and significantly more advanced control menus
• IR remote control support!

More details, photos, and source code are available on Gary’s site.

Thanks to the Make: blog for bringing this project to my attention!

DIY PID-Controlled Soldering Hotplate:

I needed a hotplate for surface mount soldering, so I built one from scratch using a milled block of aluminum, a 500W cartridge heater, and a surplus PID controller.  Some of my favorite DIY projects have been building my own tools, and this one is a great example.

The AVR HV Rescue Shield:

This year saw the release of my first electronics kit, the AVR HV Rescue Shield.  Designed in response to my own experience accidentally setting the RSTDISBL fuse on an AVR microcontroller, the AVR HV Rescue Shield has helped many microcontroller enthusiasts around the world rescue their otherwise crippled, stuck, or deaf AVR’s.

My Wifi Radio Project:

After planning out the project and completing a good chunk of the software in 2008, most of the construction of my Wifi Radio project occurred in the early part of 2009.  I put the finishing touches on the radio for the 2009 Bay Area Maker Faire.  Around the same time the project also made it onto Engadget (and a bunch of other blogs as well).  This project continues to be one of the most popular projects on the site and has inspired several other projects based on the Asus WL-520gU wireless router, including an extension to the Adafruit Industries Tweet-a-Watt.

This brings me to:

Notacon 6:

In April I flew out to Cleveland and gave a talk about Hacking the Asus WL-520gU Wireless Router at Notacon 6.   The con was a huge amount of fun but reminded me just how much work it is to give a talk.  I met lots of cool people there, including George Sanger and Jeri Ellsworth, aka The Fatman and Circuit Girl.

By the way, the submission deadline for talks at Notacon 7 closes on January 31st!

DIY TiVo IR Blaster:

My DIY TiVo IR Blaster was a simple hack constructed in an hour entirely out of parts I already had in the lab.  The best part is that eight months later, it’s still working flawlessly.  Like any good hack, this one is cheap, simple, and just works.

Harrison’s Box:

This project, codenamed “Harrison’s Box“, was a collaboration with my wife Kylie and my father-in-law Bill to build an “electronic box” to give to my nephew Harrison’s on his first birthday.  We added as many switches, knobs, and lights as we could.  Harrison loved it!

Retro Wireless Handset / Make Magazine:

I originally posted about my Bluetooth Handset Hack back in November of 2008, but it took exactly one year for the article I wrote about it to finally be published in Make: magazine volume 20.  I just learned that my Retro Wireless Handset will be featured in an upcoming episode of the Make: Weekend Projects podcast.  Cool!

Those are some of the highlights of 2009.  I hope to bring more cool projects, hacks, and kits to you in 2010!

Lastly, Happy New Year and a sincere thanks to everyone who has been reading the blog, leaving comments, buying kits, or supporting the site in some way over the past year!

Do you have a question about the Wifi Radio project or want help making your own Bluetooth Handset?

Try asking over at the discussion forums!

If you haven’t seen them before, be sure to check them out!

David Nichols made this awesome wireless twitter display by combining a hacked Asus WL-520gU wireless router with a Sparkfun serial-enabled LCD display.  The router is running the same OpenWrt distribution I used for my Wifi Radio project, plus a USB thumbdrive that provides some additional flash storage space.  I really like the custom laser cut base that holds the LCD display and the router!

For more pics and info, check out David’s flickr set for the project.

via Make: Online – Tweetster – Wireless tweets display

I’ve actually modified my playlist slightly, so here’s what I’m currently listening to.  Click on the links to open each station in Winamp or iTunes.

1. SLAY Radio

http://slayradio.org/tune_in.php/128kbps/listen.m3u

SLAY Radio is dedicated to playing original and remixed tunes from the Commodore 64.  Regular live shows that feature guest DJs who select and play their favorite C64 tunes, plus occasionally some stuff from the Amiga and other platforms.  SLAY Radio inspired me to dust off my old sid and mod files.  Does it get any better than this?

This cool banner shows what song is currently playing.  Click to visit their site.

2. KCRW Simulcast

http://scfire-dtc-aa06.stream.aol.com:80/stream/1046

An NPR affiliate based in Los Angeles, KCRW has a wide variety of music and talk radio programming.  They also transmit on FM 89.9MHz.

3. Bassdrive

http://www.bassdrive.com/v2/streams/BassDrive.pls

Bassdrive plays jungle and drum and bass (see dnb).  Lots of live shows and guest DJs.  One of my favorites.

4. di.fm – Soulful House

http://www.di.fm/mp3/soulfulhouse.pls

This group of six stations are hosted by Digitally Imported, which offers a wide variety of electronic dance music at both free and premium (higher quality/bitrate) paid membership levels.

5. di.fm – Lounge

http://www.di.fm/mp3/lounge.pls

6. di.fm – Breaks

http://www.di.fm/mp3/breaks.pls

Di.fm’s breaks station.  Another one of my favorites.

7. di.fm – Electro House

http://www.di.fm/mp3/electro.pls

8. di.fm – Future Synthpop

http://www.di.fm/mp3/futuresynthpop.pls

9. di.fm – Progressive

http://www.di.fm/mp3/progressive.pls

10. Groove Salad

http://somafm.com/play/groovesalad

Hosted by San Francisco-based soma.fm.  Plays “A nicely chilled plate of ambient beats and grooves.”  Like many of the others on this list, this station has been around forever.  It’s probably one of the first Shoutcast stations I ever tuned into, and it’s still going strong almost a decade later.

Of course, if you don’t like these presets or just want to see what else is out there, check out shoutcast.com.  You can browse or search through hundreds of other streaming radio stations featuring every possible genre of music you could think of.

A couple weeks ago, I posted about Madox, who created a floating camera platform based on an Asus WL-520gU wireless router and called it the Madox Floating Camera, or MFC.

Great news – he finished putting the MFC together just in time for the Australian Battle Group meet on June 6th and posted some pictures and videos of it in action.  Apparently the assembly involved a lot of duct tape and he had a few minor issues with the rig, but you can’t tell from the videos!

For technical details about this project, check out his MFC project page.

Here’s a sample video of scale warship combat as seen by the MFC:

(Note: your speakers are not broken, there is no audio!)

I really love this project and I hope to keep reading about it as Madox works out the bugs.

Madox – Keep up the good work!

Madox.NET » Australian Battle Group – National Battle Meet 6 June 2009.

I added a link to possible sources for as many parts as I could.  However, there were a few things I scrounged from local surplus electronics stores and couldn’t easily find a good equivalent online.  I’m not expecting everyone to copy my design exactly (not everyone has a woodworking shop at their disposal), so use these numbers as a rough estimate only.

If you shop around you should be able to beat the listed prices on many items, so I see this as sort of a worst case scenario.

To flash the wireless router and create a minimal radio (with no user interface), you will need:

• Asus WL-520gU wireless router – currently $34.99 with MiR
• SYBA SD-CM-UAUD USB Stereo Audio Adapter – $7.99
• FTDI USB TTL-232 3.3V serial adapter cable – $20
• 0.1″ Break-away Header Strip – $2.50

Total: $65.48

To make the LCD display and tuner interface, you’ll also need:

• USBtinyISP AVR programmer – $22
• 16×2 Character LCD (5V) – $13.95
• ATmega168 microcontroller – $4.11
• 28-pin socket – $1.50
  
• 16MHz crystal – $1.50
• 2 x 22pF capacitors – $0.25 ea.
• Contrast trimpot, 1k (or similar) – ~$0.75
• Tuner potentiometer, 10k – $1.40
• Reset microswitch – $0.35
• Serial connector (cut an old CD-ROM audio cable in half) – $0
  
• Protoboard – $5
• Some hookup wire - $0
  
• 0.1uF bypass cap and a few resistors (10Ohm and 1K) - around $1 at any decent electronics store

Total: $52.06

(This is on the high end, the interface can certainly be built for less by using scrounged/surplus components.)

To make the finished radio, add:

• Volume and tune knobs – ~$2 @ HSC
• Cool tuner knob – $8.55
• 5V/12V power supply brick – $10 @ Weird Stuff
• 5-pin mini-DIN power connector – ~$3 @ HSC
• Power switch – ~$1 @ HSC
• Cheap set of PC speakers (gutted for the speakers and amplifier) – $5 @ Weird Stuff

Total: $29.55

Oh yeah, and I almost forgot…

• An awesome friend named Tony with a full woodworking shop in his garage who will make you a killer wooden enclosure for free – $priceless

Grand total (excluding the box) – $147.09

If you take out the cost of the development tools, namely the FTDI cable and the USBtinyISP, the total comes out to $105 (without the box).

By scrounging materials and using parts from your junkbox you should be able to reduce that figure even more, but obviously the grand total hinges on what kind of enclosure you use.  Not everyone has a friend with serious woodworking skills willing to donate time and materials, but use this as an excuse to get creative.

I wanted a box that showcased the time and effort that I spent on the electronics inside, but that doesn’t mean an old boombox from the Salvation Army couldn’t work just as well.

When I first started this project, my goal was to keep the total parts cost under $100.  On paper, it looks like I came pretty close to that, thanks to the donated box and excluding the reusable development tools like the FTDI cable and AVR programmer.  To be honest, I probably spent twice that amount on spare power supplies, extra knobs, a second router to bring to NOTACON, and a bunch of other stuff that I didn’t end up using in the final project.  But I’m pretty ok with that.  I think this just highlights the fact that:

If you just want a Wifi Radio, it will always be cheaper to buy one off the shelf. But if you make your own, it will be infinitely more rewarding.

It certainly has been for me. 

Madox is building something he calls the MFC or Madox Floating Camera.

Presently, it consists of an Asus WL-520gU wireless router mounted in a waterproof box along with batteries, a relay control board, and four large bilge pumps for propulsion.  He plans to add a camera so he can take his contraption to the Australian Battle Group meet in June where he “hopes to film the ships shooting each another to smithereens”.

His latest post includes a video (above) of the propulsion system being tested in his bathtub.  I can’t wait to see some larger scale tests, it looks like this rig is capable of some serious speed!

MFC – Madox Floating Camera – Part 2 (via the forums)

Newegg.com is currently offering the Asus WL-520gU for $34.99 after rebate. This is the lowest price I have seen in a while, so if you’ve been debating picking one of these up to play with, it might be a good time to buy.

The WL-520gU is the very hackable wireless router I used in my Wifi Radio project.  It’s also the router used in LadyAda’s Tweet-a-Watt and the subject of a talk I gave this year at NOTACON.

It’s interesting to note that Newegg recently added the words “DD-WRT Open Source support” to the product title, so obviously they are aware of how many people buy these routers just to toss the stock firmware and throw on DD-WRT, Tomato, OpenWrt, or the oleg.wl500g.info firmware instead.

ASUS WL-520gU Wireless Router with All-in-One Print Server/ DD-WRT Open Source support

This is the tenth and final part of a series about building a low cost, open source streaming internet radio based on the ASUS WL-520gU Wireless Router.  If you haven’t already, check out the previous parts (see the links below) for some background about the project.

Wow, we’ve come a long way since part one!  To date, there have been nine parts in this series, each covering a different aspect of building the radio:

1. Building a Wifi Radio – Part 1, Introduction
2. Building a Wifi Radio – Part 2, Choosing an Embedded Platform
3. Building a Wifi Radio – Part 3, Hacking the Asus WL-520GU
4. Building a Wifi Radio – Part 4, Installing OpenWrt
5. Building a Wifi Radio – Part 5, Let’s Make Some Noise!
6. Building a Wifi Radio – Part 6, A Conversation with Mpd
7. Building a Wifi Radio – Part 7, Building an LCD Display
8. Building a Wifi Radio – Part 8, Adding a Tuning Control
9. Building a Wifi Radio – Part 9, A Few Odds and Ends
10. You are here.

Preface to Part 10:

In this part, I’m going to show you a few steps in the process I used to turn a wireless router, a breadboard, and a pile of loose parts into a finished standalone internet streaming radio receiver.  Unlike the previous parts in the series, I’m not going to provide detailed step by step instructions.  This is primarily because I don’t think it’s realistic to expect everyone to have access to the same tools and materials as I do.  Think of it this way – this is your opportunity to customize your radio.  Maybe you don’t like wood veneer, but prefer brushed aluminum or carbon fiber?  Maybe you have a laser cutter at your disposal and can turn a flat sheet of clear acrylic into a snap-together radio in less than 5 minutes?  This is your chance to express your creativity!  Go ahead and copy my design, but don’t be afraid to go off into left field either…

The Box:

Some time ago, I posted a Google Sketchup model of the radio enclosure that I created with the help of Tony, a good friend of mine who lives in Southern California.  The idea was to build a box out of wood to mimic the style of a vintage table radio.  All the components of the radio would be mounted inside the box, with the exception of the antenna (not shown).  We also wanted to add some custom touches to make the design look modern and unique, like black controls and flush mounted contoured speaker grilles and a minimalist front panel layout.

Here’s the model we came up with:

Tony and I spent a weekend in his garage near Los Angeles finalizing the design, cutting and bending sheets of plywood, making forms, and fitting various pieces of the box together.  Tony, who is far superior to me in the ways of woodworking and fabrication, did most of the work while I looked at stain colors and other details.

A few weeks later, Tony sent me this masterpiece.  Here’s the box, freshly stained and covered with many carefully sanded coats of polyurethane:

Hopefully Tony will write a post about the process of fabricating the box – he can provide a lot more details than I can.  For now, check out my photostream for some in-progress photos of the box.  Tony has some photos as well.

Once it arrived in the mail, it was up to me to combine the empty box with the pile of parts on my workbench to finish the project.

Finding an Audio Amplifier:

I wanted a small, inexpensive, stereo audio amplifier to mount inside the radio.  Originally, my goal was to find a kit with a few watts of power per channel, single supply operation (preferably with a common supply voltage, like 12V), volume and tone controls, and a compact PCB.  I never found any kits that I really liked (although I may look at 41hz for some future higher powered projects).  Eventually I gave up and bought a pair of used Altec Lansing ACS90 computer speakers for $5 from Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale, CA.

I took the speakers apart and threw away the plastic speaker boxes.  Inside one is a small stereo audio amplifier that runs on 12V @ < 2A and delivers 4W per channel.  I couldn’t ask for a better amp for this project, especially for the price!  I also salvaged the hefty speakers for reuse in the radio.

Building the LCD / Interface Circuit:

I carefully transferred my AVR microcontroller-based LCD driver / tuner control circuit from my breadboard to a piece of electronics protoboard.  Here’s the “component side” of the perfboard, showing the AVR ATmega168 microcontroller (socketed), 16MHz crystal, contrast trimpot, ICSP pins, and header socket for the LCD:

The “solder side” is mostly just interconnect wiring.  The RESET button is in the lower left corner.  I had to notch the PCB to clear one of the control pots inside the radio box.

Here’s the protoboard with the LCD installed and being tested.

Modifying the router:

I removed the USB and DC power jacks from the WL-520gU PCB.  I’m planning to use the USB port solely to talk to my SYBA USB-Audio adapter, so I removed the USB connector from the SYBA as well and wired the USB lines directly to the router.  Some people may disagree with this, but wiring directly to the router simplified the wiring inside the radio and saved space by eliminating unnecessary USB connectors.  I can always put the USB jack back later if I want to connect other USB peripherals.  A pair of wires connects the DC power pins on the router to the radio’s 5V power supply.  Don’t attempt this unless you have a decent soldering iron – it’s easy to ruin the printed circuit board by overheating the traces.

The power supply:

To supply power to the radio, AVR microcontroller, and amplifier, I needed a power supply that could provide both 5V and 12VDC.  I found a used “brick” style power supply (also at Weird Stuff) rated at 5V and 12V @ 1.5A.  I believe this type of supply is very commonly used with external hard drive enclosures and shouldn’t be too hard to find.  Initially I was concerned that a switching supply would be too noisy to use with an audio amplifier, but a quick test showed no unexpected noise from the amp.

Final assembly:

Mounting all of the components inside the radio box took a lot of time, epoxy, velcro, and hot glue.  Eventually I was able to get everything except the power supply to fit.  Although originally I had wanted to mount the supply inside the radio, keeping it external ensures that there is no 110V running around inside the box.  This is a nice safety feature, and I think it was a worthwhile compromise.

The router is mounted on the left side of the box.  I positioned it close to the back panel so that the antenna connector can pass through and the antenna can be attached.  The amplifier is on the right side.

Here’s a shot inside the box, showing the microcontroller circuit and LCD display.  The LCD is simply hot glued to the inside of the box.  You can also see the speakers mounted on either side of the display.

The finished result:

Here’s the front of the radio.  The LCD display is behind a thin sheet of smoked plexiglass that is press fit into the rectangular opening in the front panel.  The two smaller knobs are connected to potentiometers that I wired to the amplifier in place of the original controls.  The left knob controls volume, the right is for tone.  I originally wanted the volume knob to also be the power switch, but I couldn’t find a dual audio taper pot that included a switch as well.   The small knobs are from HSC in Sunnyvale.  The large knob in the center is the tuning control.  I spotted it at Mouser Electronics (#450-1755 / datasheet) and couldn’t resist using it on the radio.

Here’s a closeup of the front panel with the LCD display powered on:

The back panel is made of fiberboard from Home Depot.  The Wi-Fi antenna is shown on the left.  The LAN ports and buttons of the router are accessible through cutouts in the back panel.  A 6-pin mini-DIN power jack that matches the power supply I’m using and the power switch are shown on the right.  Four screws hold the back panel onto the box, so it’s easy to remove.

Here’s a side view showing the radio’s rounded corners and matching curved speaker grilles:

Here’s a video of the radio in action, tuning between a few different preset stations, including Slay Radio, di.fm, and San Francisco’s somafm with Groove Salad.

There are a lot more pictures on Flickr.  Check them out and keep watching the Asus Wireless Router Hacks group for other people’s creations as well!

Conclusion:

This has been an epic journey.  Back in October, when I first posted about this project, I never anticipated how much interest there would be in creating a low-cost DIY wireless streaming radio.  I am really thankful for all of the encouragement I have received, both on this site and elsewhere.  Thanks to everyone who has visited from Make and Hack a Day, as well as everyone who complimented me on my talk at NOTACON.  You guys make it all worthwhile!

By the way, if you have questions or comments, join the forums!

Thanks for reading, and until next time, happy hacking!

- Jeff Keyzer aka mightyohm

If you want to see the radio in person, stop by Expo Hall Booth 166 at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA this weekend.  I’ll be there to demonstrate the radio and answer questions!

This is the ninth part of an ongoing series about building a low cost, open source streaming internet radio based on the ASUS WL-520gU Wireless Router.  If you haven’t already, check out the previous parts (see the links at the end of this article) for some background about the project.

In part eight, we added a tuning control for the radio.  Now we can change to any of ten preset stations on the radio by adjusting the position of a potentiometer connected to our AVR microcontroller.   The LCD display we built in part seven lets us know what stream we’re listening to and the artist and title of the current song.  This project is coming together very nicely!

Before we put the final touches on this project in part ten, there are a few miscellaneous chores to take care of:

Fixing /etc/config/wireless:

Last time, we tweaked /etc/config/network to assign a static IP address to the LAN (ethernet) ports of the router.  This allowed us to directly connect a computer to the router via an ethernet cable and get a shell prompt, regardless of the state of the serial console or the wireless connection of the router.  Unfortunately, I made an omission in the setup instructions which may prevent this from working correctly.

To fix this, modify /etc/config/wireless as follows (changes are in bold, use your wireless network information in place of my example):

config wifi-device  wl0
    option type     broadcom
    option channel  3

    # REMOVE THIS LINE TO ENABLE WIFI:
    # option disabled 1

config wifi-iface
    option device   wl0
    option network  wan
    option mode     sta  # configures the router to connect to your network
    option ssid     MyNetwork # the SSID of your network
    option encryption wep  # the encryption mode of your network
    option key	XXXXXXXXXX  # add this line with your WEP key in place of X...X

The only change is to set “option network” to “wan” instead of “lan”.  This minor change tells the router to separate the wireless interface of the router from the LAN/ethernet interface and allows the router to acquire two separate IP addresses, one for each interface.

Launching mpd automatically at startup:

Manually launching mpd every time the router boots is a drag.  You can automate this by creating a symbolic link to /etc/init.d/mpd from the /etc/rc.d directory, as follows:

root@OpenWrt:~# ln -s /etc/init.d/mpd /etc/rc.d/S93mpd

Now every time the router boots, mpd will be started automatically as part of the boot process.  (That was easy!)

Boot script for the user interface:

Assuming we want a dedicated internet radio that doesn’t require user intervention to operate, the scripts for the LCD display and tuning control should also be launched at startup.  This will ensure that upon applying power, the radio will boot into a state where a stream is playing and the user interface is active.

First, we need to create a simple boot script.  Create the file /etc/init.d/AVR with the following contents:

#!/bin/sh /etc/rc.common
# Copyright (C) 2008 OpenWrt.org

START=99
start() {
sleep 5    # make sure boot process is done, no more console messages
/root/interface.sh
}

To launch the script at boot, create a symbolic link as follows:

root@OpenWrt:~# ln -s /etc/init.d/AVR /etc/rc.d/S99AVR

Every time the router boots, the user interface will automatically start, mpd will start playing the selected stream based on the tuner position, and the AVR microcontroller (assuming it is still connected to the serial port) will update the LCD display and watch the potentiometer for any changes in position.

Tweaking the firewall configuration:

This is actually optional, but it can be pretty useful while hacking on the router.  As presently configured, the router blocks incoming requests on the WAN, which now includes the wireless interface.  This prevents us from using ssh or telnet to log into the router over our wireless network.  While we can still get a shell by connecting an ethernet cable to one of the LAN ports on the router, it is often more convenient to access the router across your wireless network.

The file /etc/config/firewall controls the firewall settings.  We’ll be modifying this file.

Open the file in vi and scroll down to this section:

config zone
    option name        wan
    option input    REJECT
    option output    ACCEPT
    option forward    REJECT
    option masq        1

Edit the “option input” line so that it looks like this:

config zone
    option name        wan
    option input    ACCEPT
    option output    ACCEPT
    option forward    REJECT
    option masq        1

Now restart the firewall (or just reboot the router):

root@OpenWrt:~# /etc/init.d/firewall restart

You should now be able to ssh or telnet into the router over your wireless network.

Enable SSH:

By the way, if you want to access the router with ssh instead of telnet, just set a root password.  The telnet daemon will be disabled (for security reasons) and replaced with an SSH daemon instead.  You can do this with the “passwd” command.

root@OpenWrt:~# passwd
Changing password for root
New password: *****
Retype password: *****
Password for root changed by root
root@OpenWrt:~#

Log out of your telnet session and use ssh to log back in with your favorite ssh client (don’t forget to tell the client to use the username “root”).

Stay tuned!

That’s it for now.  Stay tuned for the final part in this series, part ten, in which I’ll talk about what it took to turn this Sketchup model into a real wooden case for the radio!

Update: Part ten (the final part in the series) is now online.

This week I finally got a working copy of the video of my talk from NOTACON 6 about hacking the Asus WL-520gU wireless router.  You can either watch the embedded video above or follow the link below to Vimeo.  If you don’t like either option, you can also download the m4v source file from here (thanks Vimeo!).

Special thanks to Media Archives for recording my talk!

NOTACON 6 – Hacking the Asus WL-520gU Wireless Router from MightyOhm on Vimeo.