An Amazing Pocket Internet Radio with a Transparent Display
Want internet radio without dealing a smartphone or computer? Then Neeraj Rane's pocket-sized device is perfect for you.
You probably have a smartphone in your pocket, so you might not see a need for something like a dedicated internet radio device. If you want to listen to something, you can just play it on your phone from an app or website. But what about kids or older folks that either don’t have smartphones or don’t like using them? What about people who just want to listen without the distractions created by smartphones? For those people, Neeraj Rane's amazing pocket internet radio device is perfect.
This device stands out in no small part because it looks fantastic. It looks like a cassette tape, has some nice graphics on the front, and features a transparent display. That display is especially cool. It is a DFRobot Fermion 1.51” transparent OLED screen with a resolution of 128x56 and running on the popular SSD1309 driver. It can accept both GDI and SPI signals. It doesn’t have a backing like a typical OLED screen, so you can see right through “black” (off) pixels. Any content drawn on the screen will appear in bright bluish pixels.
That display is the centerpiece of this internet radio. The body is a combination of a 3D-printed frame and PCB covers. By making the enclosure partially from PCBs, Rane was able to keep the cost and size down, while also integrating nice PCB artwork. The front PCB doesn’t have any electrical connections and is just there for protection. The back PCB contains most of the electronic components.
The most important of those components in an ESP32 microcontroller. That was chosen for its built-in WiFi adapter, which lets it connect to the internet and pull audio streams. Two buttons let the user cycle through the available streams and audio pumps out to a small speaker through a MAX98357 Class D amplifier. Power comes from a 120mAh lithium battery.
The supplied code is programmable through the Arduino IDE. Users can copy the URLs for any audio streams they like. Those can be found on websites like internet-radio.com, which has a massive repository of thousands of different channels. Range has instructions on how to find an appropriate URL to drop into the Arduino sketch.
After adding the URLs and flashing the code, users can then enjoy internet radio without ever touching a smartphone.