I finally got the radio-project I've been talking about for the past while working. To recap:
- I started with an RDA5807M module, but that was too small, and too badly-performing.
- I moved on to using an Si4703-based integrated "evaluation" board. That was fine for headphones, but little else.
- I finally got a TEA5767-based integrated "evaluatioN" board, which works just fine.
- Although it is missing RDS (the system that lets you pull the name of the station off the transmission).
- It also has no (digital) volume-control, so you have to adjust the volume physically, like a savage.
The project works well, despite the limitations, so I have a small set of speakers and the radio wired up. I can control the station via my web-browser and have an alarm to make it turn on/off at different times of day - cheating at that by using the software-MUTE facility.
All in all I can say that when it comes to IoT the "S stands for Simplicity" given that I had to buy three different boards to get the damn thing working the way I wanted. That said total cost is in the region of €5, probably about the same price I could pay for a "normal" hand-held radio. Oops.
The writeup is here:
The second project I've been working on recently was controlling a piece of ePaper via an ESP8266 device. This started largely by accident as I discovered you can buy a piece of ePaper (400x300 pixels) for €25 which is just cheap enough that it's worth experimenting with.
I had the intention that I'd display the day's calendar upon it, weather forecast, etc. My initial vision was a dashboard-like view with borders, images, and text. I figured rather than messing around with some fancy code-based grid-layout I should instead just generate a single JPG/PNG on a remote host, then program the board to download and display it.
Unfortunately the ESP8266 device I'm using has so little RAM that decoding and displaying a JPG/PNG from a remote URL is hard. Too hard. In the end I had to drop the use of SSL, and simplify the problem to get a working solution.
I wrote a perl script (what else?) to take an arbitrary JPG/PNG/image of the correct dimensions and process it row-by-row. It would keep track of the number of contiguous white/black pixels and output a series of "draw Lines" statements.
The ESP8266 downloads this simple data-file, and draws each line one at a time, ultimately displaying the image whilst keeping some memory free.
I documented the hell out of my setup here:
And here is a sample image being displayed:
Tags: epaper, esp8266, radio 2 comments