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My MIL is 93, and the only tech she can really deal with is turning on the radio and TV and changing channels. She is fond of music from old classics (from the
by sriram_malhar 3y ago
My MIL is 93, and the only tech she can really deal with is turning on the radio and TV and changing channels.
She is fond of music from old classics (from the 60's and earlier), so I hooked up a Raspberry PI with an FM transmitter and created her own private radio station. She tells me what songs she likes and I create different playlists that get broadcast on her station. It preserves the surprise element of radio, and there is nothing in there she doesn't like.
The tiny FM transmitter is surprisingly powerful. Her neighbours (of similar vintage) are very happy too, so their requests have also started coming in :)
EDIT: I wanted to add that I am the UI ... she doesn't get to choose the playlist. To make my life easier, I just created different playlists for different times of the day ... calm/spiritual/slower numbers in the early and late hours, peppy during the late morning and evening etc.
- zimpenfish 3y agoFor the true feeling of radio, you might throw some episodes of The Big Broadcast on there as well - I believe archive.org has some but they're easily findable elsewhere. Donate some money to WFUV[1] or buy some of the collections[2] if you just want the music. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WFUV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WFUV [2] https://rivermontrecords.com/search?type=product&q=big+broadcast https://rivermontrecords.com/search?type=product&q=big+broad...
- JKCalhoun 3y agoLike this site: https://oldtime.radio https://oldtime.radio
- mysterydip 3y agoThanks for the link! I've enjoyed radio classics on satellite radio, so having an on-demand for specific genres is a welcome option.
- thelandofrandom 3y ago[dead]
- lapser 3y ago> The tiny FM transmitter is surprisingly powerful. Her neighbours (of similar vintage) are very happy too, so their requests have also started coming in :) Sounds like you're about to start a Radio station for the nation.
- fendy3002 3y agoOr it'll be enough only for local area. We don't need everything to be nation-scale, local-community activities need to be promoted more.
- MikeTheGreat 3y agoBased on how you're asking I assuming that "Radio station for the nation" is a quote from a movie or something, but searching for it reveals surprisingly little (and is surprisingly random - Google / Bing clearly has _no_ idea what I'm looking for :) ) Is this a quote / reference to something? If so, could you let us all in on what it's referring to?
- burritofanatic 3y agoAll I could think of was the song Radio, Radio. See the line about cleaning up the nation. https://genius.com/Elvis-costello-radio-radio-lyrics https://genius.com/Elvis-costello-radio-radio-lyrics
- lapser 3y agoSorry, no dice. It isn't, at least not intentionally.
- MikeTheGreat 3y agoNo worries! Thanks for replying, though - thinking "there _must_ be a quote, I just don't know it / can't find it" woulda bugged me :)
- mihaaly 3y ago: ))
- martinjacobd 3y agoThis made my day, thank you for sharing. Such a sweet thing to do.
- phkahler 3y agoI love how this requires ZERO learning effort on her part, she simply has a personalized ratio station rather than whatever someone else puts on.
- nXqd 3y agowow, I really enjoy the idea that basically, she just uses what works for her with better content. Really nice work
- intelVISA 3y agoI love this, thx for sharing :)
- FridayoLeary 3y agoI have a spare rpi lying around. I know what i want to do with it now...
- noman-land 3y agoAbsolutely love this idea. Great work.
- emaginniss 3y agoYou should start selling ad time
- umvi 3y agoDid you have to apply for some kind of permit to do that? Or is it low power enough that FCC doesn't care?
- LinuxBender 3y agoFWIW there are many transmitters similar to what they built that enable playing MP3 players, phones and other things on old radios [1]. I do not remember what the power limit is but no permit is required. They can operate throughout the entire FM broadcast spectrum. If they are broadcasting good music in an elderly community I doubt anyone will complain. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08L3WX26S/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08L3WX26S/
- froglets 3y agoSeveral homes in my city put up holiday lights that are synced to music and transmitted over FM. The signal only works if you’re parked near the house.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoEarth Angel, will you be mine… How about a speech synthesis DJ, “that was Foo McBar from 19XX”?
- follower 3y agoSince I've been playing around with Piper Text-to-Speech & the associated LibriTTS voice model, I couldn't resist: * https://rancidbacon.gitlab.io/piper-tts-demos/#various_radio_0 https://rancidbacon.gitlab.io/piper-tts-demos/#various_radio... If the six speakers I selected for the demo don't match your taste in DJs, there's around 900 more in that voice model to try... :D (The 3 audio players differ only in file format & whether I ran the output through normalization.) Also, I was pretty impressed/surprised at the quality of their pronunciation of the meta-syntactic variables. :)
- mixmastamyk 3y agoHa, that’s awesome. Several of the voices sounded just right for radio. I see the lib is limited to 24khz, maybe why it has an almost AM radio sound?
- drivers99 3y agoThey all sound out of breath. Not sure what causes that effect/perception. Listening to it again, it seems like the plosives (like d, or t) have no pop like there was no air pressure behind them.
- wnolens 3y agoThanks for sharing. I aspire to such elegant projects.
- bazmattaz 3y agoWhat app do you use to make the playlists? You could use the Spotify api for this
- MandieD 3y agoThis is inspirational for my gaggle of non-tech, super-senior relatives. Thanks so much for sharing.
- PaulHoule 3y agoSee also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZCw9bUJ6q8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZCw9bUJ6q8
- maebert 3y agoThe internet archive has tons of old radio shows too; my favourite is The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which aired in the early 40s. Best thing is that it also has the original ads in there. “Now that the poultry shortage is over, why not enjoy a glass of wine with your Sunday chicken roast?” Might be cute to include some old original programming in your pirate radio! https://archive.org/details/sherlock-holmes-1939-11-06-6-the-bruce-partington-plans https://archive.org/details/sherlock-holmes-1939-11-06-6-the...
- ismokedoinks 3y agoI used to work construction with one of those big old radios covered in paint that has been dropped 1000 times--we got around to using an FM transmitter dangling off the phone for it. It was fun + charming, since then I've thought about getting a big radio setup and hard-wiring Bluetooth in but your setup sounds truer to the concept.
- davchana 3y agoWould love to see a blog about this setup. I, not old, always want to dump much of my music & simply want to listen whatever is next (& miss it if I don't listen) just like radio.
- ecliptik 3y agoHave you seen Icecast [1]? You create playlists of local music, then play them with something like mpd. Icecast then streams them out and clients like VLC, xmms2, and even older versions of Winamp can stream it. I set this up for all my music in shuffle mode for my own radio-like always on streaming service via Tailscale. 1. https://icecast.org/faq/ https://icecast.org/faq/
- lloydatkinson 3y agoI’ve wanted to try something like this with a Pi or something else running Linux. Is mpd a good choice for that scenario? Does it support being able to use custom events eg a button on the gpio for play/pause?
- nsteel 3y agompd is a great choice, there are lots of things built around it. Essentially, you'd have the GPIOs trigger mpc commands. mpc talks MPD over the network back to the mpd server, so you could have physical controls all around the place. There are lots of examples online of people doing this sort of thing. There's a simple example at https://github.com/pablodo/mpd_gpio/blob/master/main.py https://github.com/pablodo/mpd_gpio/blob/master/main.py Even a chapter of a book about it: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4842-2406-9_12 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4842-2406-9_... (I just found this, no idea if it's any good). And also an IR version at https://www.ziemski.net/rcmpd/ https://www.ziemski.net/rcmpd/
- tipsysquid 3y agoI love this for her and for me. Best gift you can give to a music lover
- neodypsis 3y agoVery cool. Do you connect it to Spotify or to an MP3 collection?
- sriram_malhar 3y agoFrom my MP3 collection. I buy the songs or albums she likes and broadcast them. For some that are not on sale anywhere, I scrape them off youtube, but usually send a note to that channel for original sources where I can pay for it.
- neodypsis 3y agoCool! I asked because there are many niche playlists on Spotify you can find for oldies, for example some very specific for the 60s, 50s, 40s, etc. Perhaps it could help her discover similar, but new, music.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoWhat transmitter did you use?
- john_shafthair 3y agoOne can go on Amazon and order himself a high powered FM transmitter direct from China. Stick an antenna in the attic and you'll be heard for miles. If you don't gaf about spurious emissions or laws or anything like that you too can be Christian Slater in Pump Up the Volume. The fines for this in the US can be pretty severe but Amazon is happy to sell you the rope to hang yourself with free shipping.
- sriram_malhar 3y agoI forget. But just search for "kit FM transmitter". I'd fully intended to build a "proper" transmitter, and was keenly disappointed that you could just buy a cheap single-chip board. Nowadays you don't even need that. You can turn the RPi itself into an FM transmitter. Search "how to FM broadcast on raspberry pi"
- ale42 3y ago> You can turn the RPi itself into an FM transmitter. Never tried it, but given the way it works, you definitely need some output filtering unless you accept to pollute all harmonics of your channel (which might be licensed spectrum too, and interfere with services you don't want to interfere with in the first point)
- idonotknowwhy 3y agoYou do still need that. The broadcast from gpio thing is very low quality and produces square waves which interfere with everything
- hcrean 3y agoPico caps and appropriate impedance miss-match can be used to round-off square waves. But yes, if you look at high-speed Pi GPIO with a Rigol it looks more like an EKG readout than the thing you might see on a logic analyser. Smoothing it enough to feed a line-amp is very lossy.
- jay3ss 3y agoI love it. Not only is this wholesome, it's pretty cool too
- quaintdev 3y agoOP seems from India and AFAIK its illegal to transmit on FM frequencies without a license. I understand it might be low powered but theres a chance of Police coming knocking on the door. Whats worse is it might interfere with emergency services. There is a reason we have spoctrum licences.
- jacquesm 3y agoYes, technically it is illegal. But I've seen all kinds of gizmos that would inject a signal into the FM band to allow the use of car stereos that didn't have an 'aux' input. At those power levels the FCC isn't going to be bothered unless someone lodges a complaint, and even then they'll have a hard time finding the source unless they're practically standing on top of it. OP may want to turn down the radiated power until it just works for his MIL but no longer for the neighbors.
- jeswin 3y agoBut quaintdev is right in that Indian Police for some reason takes this somewhat seriously. For highway patrol, I suspect it's boredom and this gives them something to chase. I remember in the late 90s when I was in college, the police showed up a couple of times when students were transmitting from one of the hostels. They'd let it go, but they did show up.
- jacquesm 3y agoAt what levels of power was this? I suspect the OPs transmitter is hard to detect even at close (< 100 meters > 30 meters) range. Anything more powerful and you would definitely attract attention.
- mdip 3y ago> Yes, *technically* it is illegal. Oh how many phrases start "Yes, technically" in my life. The law is an interesting beast. I know nothing about the law in India as it relates to FM band transmitters but I suspect that the law predates the common availability of adapters that one might use in ones car to add an input to a stereo that lacks such a highly technical circular hole for such purposes[0]. Once these devices gained wide adoption due to both their utility and -- more generally -- the fact that operating one is usually so benign that they can be difficult to discover let alone actually cause enough interference to warrant them to be seized. The intention of the law was to prevent someone from operating a pirate radio station/give exclusivity to a single license-holder for that frequency. Since these devices don't violate the spirit of the law, the governing body finds it easier to carve out an informal exemption rather than explicitly write one in. It can also be tricky to correct a law that has a very valid reason for existing but may have cases where total enforcement isn't realistic[1]. The law may not have caught up to the reality on the ground and the legislatures answer to it is "enforce it when the interference is enough that someone notices." One might imagine a world where something akin to TV Detector-like Vans[2] drape the country-side in a dragnet to catch all of those pirate FM-input-devices but that usually only happens if there's a substantial amount of tax revenue to be gained ... to pay for the vans. [0] I had one of these in the 90s (in the US, where it's not illegal if designed correctly) that connected my Discman to my ridiculously sad factory radio which lacked both external input and even a cassette deck. [1] I do very little with regard to radio communication (if that isn't obvious) but I'd imagine most lawmakers do even less, so now you have to bring in experts to figure out "what's an acceptable amount of interference in this specific use case" and "how should a device like this be restricted." Not that government isn't famous for wildly wasting money or anything but I'd imagine the thinking is that it's not worth the effort to correct. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van
- sandreas 3y agoCool. For the others: You don't even need a transmitter to do some experiments, you can use just one IO Pin for this: https://nerdiy.de/en/raspberrypi-send-fm-signals-by-gpio-pin/ https://nerdiy.de/en/raspberrypi-send-fm-signals-by-gpio-pin... Furthermore, you can use something like https://volumio.com/en/ https://volumio.com/en/ build an RFID Box https://pilabor.com/projects/labelmaker/#products-to-build-the-phoniebox https://pilabor.com/projects/labelmaker/#products-to-build-t... (my daughter used this when she was 2 years old)
- nsteel 3y agoPhoniebox is a great project, based on mpd and Mopidy. Hopefully Spotify playback will be fully supported again soon.
- dicknuckle 3y agoI am absolutely LOVING Volumio. It's running in a VM in my garage computer that does various other things. At the time, Volumio didn't have a clean way to do this so I just hacked away until it booted and played music. A little USB sound card is passed through to the VM and it's been rock solid for about 2 years now. I use it exclusively as a Spotify chromecast type thing that cost me about $3.50 in parts.
- runjake 3y agoAny clue how powerful the "one IO pin" approach is compared to a dedicated FM transmitter?
- sandreas 3y agoNo, I'm using this in my car just for a very short range (< 200mm)
- svnt 3y agoA standard 3.3V GPIO can typically push something like 30 to 60 mW. You won’t get all of that as transmitted signal — it will depend on how well your random antenna wire matches the impedance of the gpio and the frequency. I’m really not sure the audio quality is going to be anything more than just intelligible, but I’d guess you’d get at least 10 mW or so of useful power, which means it should generally work within a small house.