Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Weekend Projects – Raspberry Pirate Radio”.
Hi i’m sam freeman, with make have you ever thought about becoming a pirate? No, not the yar matey type of pirate, but the builder of a pirate radio station in today’s weekend project we’re going to turn a raspberry pi into a powerful fm transmitter with enough range to cover your home, diy, drive-in, movie, high school football stadium or bumpin. Pirate bike parade the pirate radio is based on pi fm by oliver mattos and oscar weigel, which was revised by ryan. Grassel makes engineering intern winter woods contributed to the project with the pirate radio python script, which enables playback without using the command line and will handle just about any music file format automatically. This is a great example of the collaborative power of the open source community. Okay, let’s get started, you’ll need the following parts which can be picked up at your local radio shack and these basic tools you only need an hour or so to complete this build, and it’s a great first project for learning about the raspberry pi. One last thing: before we start: the pirate radio is capable of transmitting between 1 and 250 megahertz, which may interfere with government fans. Please stay within the fm band and always choose a frequency.
That’S not in use to avoid interference with licensed broadcasters. Please check your local laws before transmitting we’ll start by building the antenna. All you need for a basic antenna is a length of wire. We used a length of 12 gauge solid wire and it worked just fine start by cutting off the end of a female jumper wire next solder it to one end of your antenna, wire and insulate the connection with some heat shrink tubing. You can add a bit of hot glue around the joint for additional support. All that’s left to do is plug it into pin 4 of your raspberry pi.
Now it’s time to upload the software to the sd card, you can download the make lab’s disk image from the project page. Our image has been optimized enables more playback options and it takes the work out of partitioning the card into system and data. Partitions keep in mind, you can’t just drag the files to your sd card. It must be flashed to work if you’re not familiar with this process. Don’T worry it’s easy just head over to the project page for a link to a tutorial. The last step is to add your music to the sd card.
Simply add your artist or album folders to the root of the pirate radio partition on the sd card. Your music files can be nested within these folders, so there’s no need to dump all your files into one mess on the root directory, and with makes improvements to the code. You can now use almost any music format. You’Ve got mp3, flac, wave, m4a, aac or wma, and the code will handle them automatically once your sd card is ready, you can set the broadcast frequency in the pirate radio config file open up the file on a text editor, and you should see something like this.
Keep in mind that fm frequencies typically range from 87.5 megahertz to 108 megahertz. You should pick a frequency that isn’t being used in your area for best results. You can also configure a few other settings like shuffle and repeat when you’re done configuring the settings save the file and get ready to start broadcasting. Now all that’s left to do is plug in your raspberry pi tune your fm radio to your frequency and enjoy the broadcast, keep in mind that it’ll take about 15 seconds to warm up once it does.
You should hear your music loud and clear. The pirate radio is a clever hack of the clock signals that are generated for the gpio pins on the raspberry pi. If you’d like to learn more about how it works head on over to the project page for all the technical details, it’s a great place to share projects, ask questions and, most importantly, learn how to make your pi radio portable. You .
