Really Rocket Science

 

 The Bass Station is a big 80’s boombox, complete with a router, etc:

The external form of the Bass-Station is a vintage 1980’s boom box. Internally, the tape and radio mechanisms have been removed and replaced with a modern miniature computer. The computer contains a sound output device, a large hard-drive, and a wireless network interface card. All the components that make up the device are standard and readily available around the world.

Going one step deeper, the computer, running a modern operating system (Linux), uses the wireless interface card to create a self-standing yet open wireless network. It functions as an access-point broadcasting its presence in a limited range making the network only accessible by a localized community. The network that is created cannot access external networks nor is it accessible from other networks like the Internet, for example.

A collection of networking services make it easy and simple for users in the presence of the network to join and begin interacting with the content that is there. A DHCP server [1] is used to automatically assign IP addresses to clients trying to join the network. A DNS server [2] is configured in a manner that will redirect users to a central location regardless of the domain that they are requesting (e.g. asking for www.google.com, or any other domain, will always direct a user to the Bass-Station’s domain.) A web server is used to serve people the main interface to the Bass-Station’s functionality. All of these services combined facilitate a person’s interaction with the content and functionality of the Bass-Station. Lastly, there is a program called the Bassment Daemon that manages the audio engine and playing of music from the stereo’s speakers.

 

 Or get yourself Microchip’s Internet Radio Demo Board:

The main chip on this board is the PIC18F97J60 which uses integrated MAC and PHY to interface directly to the RJ45 MigJack Ethernet cable connector. Communication over the internet is made easy by having Microchip’s TCP/IP stack programmed on the 97J60 micro controller. The microcontroller’s I/O is used to interface to the OLED graphics LCD display. This display allows for showing the IP address, mode of operation, song and station. Using this phi interface the microcontroller interfaces to the BLFI5BS1011 Mp3 audio decoder. A simple audio head set jack will allow listener to plug into standard head phones or connect to a speaker like this so that multiple people can listen at the same time. The URL website addresses for multiple internet radio stations are preprogrammed on the system. So push buttons will allow the use to scroll through the radio stations and select the desired station. Other push buttons are for volume up and down.

 Awesome:

 

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 8:17 am and is filed under Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.