piSingleSwitchRadio

...is a simple script that transforms your Raspberry Pi into an Internet radio receiver controllable with just one switch connected to the GPIO pins. If you have a reset/power switch from an old computer case lying around, it could be one of the easiest Pi projects utilizing the GPIO pins!

• It fetches your favourite Internet radio stations list from the JSON file,
• short click of the switch - turn on/change the station,
• it reads the radio station name with speech synthesizer,
• long press of the switch (more than 1 sec) - turn off.

Ingredients:

• Raspberry Pi (developed and tested on the Pi 1 B+ model, should work flawlessly on the newer models),
• Hi-Fi set or a boombox or whatever that could play music,
• switch (eg. from an old PC case),
• cable to connect RPi and Hi-Fi set,
• piSingleSwithRadio.py and piSingleSwithRadio.json files somewhere in your home directory (most cases /home/pi).

Let's do some tinkering...

1. Connect switch to the Raspberry Pi

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2. Connect RPi to your Hi-Fi set

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3. Tidy everything

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Configuring environment

1. Install required packages

Following script runs only on Raspberry Pi. It also requires mpv and espeak packages. Install it by following console commands:

$ sudo apt install mpv
$ sudo apt install espeak

2. Deploy piSingleSwitchRadio script

Put piSingleSwithRadio.py and piSingleSwithRadio.json files somewhere in your home directory (most cases /home/pi). Then set executable bit on piSingleSwithRadio.py script by:

$ chmod +x ~/piSingleSwithRadio.py

Now you can launch piSingleSwithRadio manualy by:

$ ~/piSingleSwithRadio.py

or add:

/home/pi/piSingleSwithRadio.py

to your startup scripts (for example /etc/rc.local before "exit 0" line).

3. Configure radio stations

Configuration file looks like this:

[
	{
		"name": "BBC Radio 1",
		"lang": "en",
		"url": "http://bbcmedia.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcmedia_radio1_mf_p"
	},
	{
		"name": "BBC Radio 2",
		"lang": "en",
		"url": "http://bbcmedia.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcmedia_radio2_mf_p"
	},
	{
		"name": "Yorkshire Coast Radio",
		"lang": "en",
		"url": "http://str1.sad.ukrd.com/yorkshirecoast.m3u"
	},
	{
		"name": "France Musique Classique plus",
		"lang": "fr",
		"url": "http://www.listenlive.eu/fr_francemusiqueplus.m3u"
	}	
]

It's basicly json array of objects. One object represents a radio station.

• name: name of the radio station (speech synthesizer reads it)
• lang: language of the radio statnion name (for speech synthesizer)
• url: URL of the radio stream

Where to find radio statnions?

Personaly I use www.listenlive.eu. Not every link is working, so I recommend to test radio URL before adding it to the config file.

Using piSingleSwitchRadio

If everything is up and running:

• short switch press - speech synthesizer reads first radio station name, then radio starts playing (in Raspberry Pi 1 it could be slight delay for buffering),
• next short switch press - speech synthesizer reads next radio station name and next radio station starts playing,
• long switch press - radio turns off (long press - more than 1 second)

Thats all!