audio | Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi, for all your 50s diner needs

Have you ever been to a cafe or restaurant with 1950s jukebox wallboxes in each booth? Wallboxes were an extension for a jukebox, making it more convenient to select music right from your table. You’d drop a coin in, choose a song from the flipbook behind the glass, chrome and plastics, and the machine would send pulses down a wire to the restaurant’s jukebox, where a stepper would decode the pulses and queue up the song you’d picked. Refurbished wallboxes occasionally pop up in mock-50s diners; you’ll also see them for sale on eBay for anything up to a few hundred quid, and people buy them to add to their jukeboxes, or just as home decoration (I’ve seen one being used as a particularly cumbersome phonebook).

Wallbox in situ

Steve Devlin bought himself a couple of wallboxes a few years ago, meaning to hook them up to an MP3 player. He then switched over to a SONOS wireless media system in his house, and forgot about the wallboxes for a couple of years.

Enter the Pi.

On looking at a Raspberry Pi and a wallbox, Steve had an idea. Why not hook the two up together to make a controller for the SONOS system? The Pi decodes the pulses from the box, and sends the information to the SONOS system. (This approach will work with any UPnP protocol, so you’re not limited to using SONOS.)

Steve’s thinking about further customisation: a strip in the box with Radio 4 on it; some dynamic strips like “songs of the week”, which will play a selection of the week’s most-played tunes; some LEDs to show a binary index of common faults, like the wifi being down, or a song not being found.

There are full instructions and much more information on Steve’s website. We think there’s something really compelling about this mix of old and new; thanks for sharing, Steve!

Media streaming without Air Play

Just before the New Year, we saw a lot of links in the tech press to a very neat hack using a Raspberry Pi as an Apple AirPlay receiver. The project had so many news stories written about it before I’d spotted it that I didn’t put it on this blog at the time because I thought most of you would have seen it – but do go and have a look if you’re a iTunes person (and have managed to get your head around the new layout of the library in iTunes 11 – my own failure to have got accustomed to it so far makes me worry about brain softening).

If you’re not an iTunes person, and you’re looking for an open alternative, you could do a lot worse than use Stephen Phillips’ UPnP/DLNA streaming method, which uses Android phones as remote controls. Your music lives on a server, and streams to your home speakers via the Pi. You can also play your music by streaming it to any of those phones, whether you’re at home or out gallivanting.

If you already have at least one Android device and some speakers, Stephen reckons that your outlay, including the Pi, should be about £45 – contrast this with the cost of a similar (closed) setup using Sonos hardware (today’s price on Amazon, with a sale on, was £230). Audio quality should be as good as – or even better than, depending on what your home hi-fi setup is like – an off-the-shelf solution using AirPlay, Sonos or Squeezebox, despite coming in at a fifth the price.

This is something I’ve been meaning to set a Pi up at home to do for ages (a little thing called work has got in the way). If you want to make your own streaming setup, Stephen has easy-to-follow instructions on his blog.

Radio-4-Matic

Update, Jan 12: Cargo Cult (whose name is actually Adam Foster) found that a lot of people were very interested in this project. Not least, Radio 4. Who interviewed him for the PM programme this afternoon about his hack. You can hear the programme at the PM website – listen now, because I can’t guarantee how long this will stay up! Adam’s bit starts at 27m00s.

I know several of you are making your own version of this project. Adam’s now blogged all the code you’ll need and very thorough instructions: so you’ve got no excuse for not getting started!

I’ve got a longstanding addiction to BBC Radio 4. It’s my alarm clock, keeps me company in the car, gives me something to shout at, and occasionally furnishes lovely surprises (like New Year’s morning last week, when the Raspberry Pi got a shout out on the Today program, and then Eben’s Dad was on ten minutes later talking about English dialect).

It can be a bit discombobulating trying to listen to Radio 4 online when you’re out of the country – Listen Again isn’t available for a day or so, and if you listen live, nothing is on at the right time. I must be woken by the soft keenings of James Naughtie, or else the day just doesn’t go right. PM must start at 5pm, and always coincides with a cup of tea. The Archers at 7 is a reminder that it’s time to turn off the radio, get out of the study and make dinner. Time-shifting any of these things just makes the day shapeless and wrong. Happily, our forum member Cargo Cult has experienced the same discombobulation. So he’s used a Raspberry Pi to build a time-travelling radio. He says:

Timezones. It’s live radio, but all the timing is wrong. Namely, the written-in-stone Radio 4 schedule must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to become misaligned from the rising and the setting of the sun. How could anything (or anyone) remotely British even think of operating normally if the Friday evening comedy gets broadcast on Friday morning, or if the Book at Bedtime arrives early in the evening? Or heaven forbid, if Woman’s Hour escapes from its usual 10am ghetto?

So, short of removing both the North American continent and the Atlantic Ocean in order to make Seattle a suburb of Plymouth, we’re going to have to take the existing internet radio streaming and add a timezone-busting delay. Oh, and then wrap the whole thing in a suitably middle-class casing complete with a Royal warrant of appointment.Luckily, we moved west of the Prime meridian, so we can get away without using actual time travel.

Cue the Radio-4-Matic.

From the outside, the Radio-4-Matic looks just like the old Roberts radio my Grandma had in her kitchen. It’s had a Pi inserted into its helpless torso. The LW, MW and SW buttons provide line-in audio from the Pi’s analogue audio-out – VHF still operates as a regular radio. And the audio that’s coming from the Pi is BBC Radio 4, time-shifted so that wherever you are, the shipping forecast is on at twelve minutes to one in the morning. Ford’s in his flivver, all’s well with the world.

Cargo Cult hasn’t written a how-to guide yet (he does plan to), but he has an excellent description of what he did with enough pointers in there to allow you to set one up yourself if you’re a relatively seasoned coder. You can read more (and ask questions) in this thread in our forums.

Pumpkin Pi

We’re on the hunt for guest posts for a couple of weeks in November. See this post for more details on how to contribute.

There seem to be a lot of Raspberry Pi + pumpkin projects around at the moment. Can’t think why.

Gordon@Drogon’s Pumpkin Pi (as featured in the MagPi). Gordon had to photograph this in the summer, when pumpkins were not available, so he’s used a sort of Halloween bucket instead. Click the picture for instructions and more bucket photos.

There’s non-pumpkin spooky activity out there too. I love this: it’s a Raspberry Pi, an eight-switch relay, a garage door lifter rod, and a can opener, all hacked together to make a candy dispensing machine so you don’t actually have to interact with any children or open the front door on Halloween.

I love this even more: it’s a Raspberry Pi and a Makey Makey in a box, hooked together to make a Halloween sound box that uses the conductivity of your fingers to trigger events.

And Shawn Wallace at Make has made this, with an Arduino, a Pi, some switches and a recording of the Wilhelm Scream. Visit Make for complete instructions on making your own.

Do you have any Halloween Pi plans? Let us know in the comments.