Finally, after years of putting it away, after a few design changes and a fried motherboard I have a linux jukebox. Well, not a jukebox but more an internet radio.

Linux internet radio inside a vintage Blaupunkt radio case

When I first had the ideea I noticed an old ~ ’50s Blaupunkt Radio my father had in his basement. I investigated if the radio was worth restoring but the inside was rusted, the capacitors were long gone and most of the tubes were missing. It was more a case of rebuilding rather than restoring. I checked around the internet and saw that many models like this one existed, so it was not rare. And so, the radio was gutted and the insides went away. I cleaned and repaired the case as best as I could.

The first ideea was to have a big harddrive inside, an amp and external speakers hooked to it. It worked like this for a while until the motherboard I used fried and so did the amp. The project was eventualy put aside.

Anyways recently, I aquired an old Pentium III Compaq. By the case I could swear it was a small motherboard. It was NOT, and also the custom compaq psu had very short wires, but I managed to fit it inside. Since I have a media center pc hooked to the tv and the surround with all the music on it I decided to change the original ideea and make it what it originally was: a radio.

So, I gutted an old set of very good sounding Altec Lansing computer speakers and installed the small amp and speakers inside. I also mounted the motherboard and psu inside. One small fan on a side does the job of cooling everything down. I use one of the buttons on the front for the amp and another one for the computer.

I gave up the harddrive from the original design for a compact flash <-> ide adapter and the system now boots from a 4 Gb compact flash card. I think I could have squeezed everything on a smaller card but I decided to do all the compiling in place and since cards are cheap I went for a big one. The adapter has space for a second card and, if I want I can fit a second, bigger card, to hold some music.

I have a usb numpad for control and the usb lcd display featured some time ago on this site for display.

Software:

• mpd for playback
• mpc for mpd control
• Lcdproc and lcd-stuff for usb lcd display
• esekeyd for numpad control
• a bunch of bash scripts to glue everything in place

I hit a few problems:

• Event Music Player Client daemon does not work, at least with my keypad. So I had to use an external daemon – esekeyd with mpc to control mpd.
• lcd-stuff does not display the Name tag (that would be the radio station name, just the artist and track name. Fortunately it has a configuration tag to use as a title for the screen – on every playlist change a bashscript modifies that configuration setting to reflect the radio station’s name and reloads lcd-stuff – it’s ugly but it works.
• I didn’t find a way to save .pls and .m3u files and have them recognized by the mpd database. So a script is called at boot time (and also can be started from one of the keys on the keypad) to generate a playlist of the radio stations. Control is easy after that, it’s a matter of play/stop, next / prev
• I wanted to have a way to shut down the system safely from the keypad. OTOH I didn’t want shutting down every time I hit the wrong key. But esekeyd doesn’t support combinations. So I had * create a file, / create a second one but only if the first file (created by *) existed and on backspace press verify if the two files exist and if yes poweroff.

I’ll post soon more photos, the insides and the configuration files and bash scripts used.

Have fun.

As you might have noticed I am a big fan of gadgets and computers. A few months ago I was about to buy a small netbook for my needs. Fortunately I borrowed one from a neighbour for a few days. That was a lousy experience.  Cramped keyboard, slow processor and inexistent battery life. I usually understand the limitations imposed by small and cheap devices, but I didn’t thought that I’ll get all of them. I mean I can put up with a slow machine if it has good battery life, or with a lower battery life but better performance. Add to that some limitation imposed by the XP license – like 1 Gb of RAM. I get better use out of my Nokia N800 internet tablet anyday. Besides that I find the netbooks I checked out loud and hot. Again two features that should exclude each other – it’s either a slow fan with a big heatsink heating a bigger surface of the laptop meaning a quiet machine either the other way around.

We have an older Toshiba M100 that my wife uses which has always been silent. The only time that I hear it’s fan is when I encode video files on it. And even then I notice it, it’s still quiet. I would expect a small machine, with an extremely efficeint cpu to be silent.

I still think that I’ll get a laptop just for me in the future but for now I think I’ll go with a thin and light 12” or 13” laptop that usually costs only a bit more than a netbook and still sports double the ram, a dual core cpu, double battery life and only a bit more weight.

By the way, I see more and more manufacturers pushing 12” netbooks. Why? It’s enough to call it a netbook to be able to sell it with an insuficient battery, slow cpu, crap on board graphics ?

I know that netbooks are all the rage today but I sure am happy that I didn’t buy one.