Introduce Yourself

Hi,

Erik here. I'm retired- disabled. My children are all grown with families of their own. I- all alone with my pet PC' and Video Games- my Apartment- TV- Stereo- some music- my old car- food- ok health- lots of snow/ maybe. I survive pretty well actually. I am not unhappy at all.

I'm very happy I can get .pls .m3u files I can use in my Jet Audio Player. Jet has the best sound quality of all players imo. I also use VLC and Pot Player. I use vlc for its built-in net radio when nothing else works for jet- Pot is my default vid player. I use all of them for other or extra things- like pull screens from vids for animated gifs or can convert my cd' to mp3 etc. This is the only site I have found that has the pls and m3u for my personal player- the browser players suck.

I actually started this account because I was having probs. Some channels would not give me the pls or m3u. Today I noticed on right side some are locked- but some show locked still give the files. Also- some stations when go to play them was not the genre I selected. For some odd reason it all seems to work today. I can stream net radio using my players- yes- Happy Joy joy.

I just chill- build my PC' to play games- mostly on Steam. Maybe my lap-top on the side- Bluetooth music to my stereo. I mostly listen to classic rock- metal- alt- punk- southern rock- rnb- old school and gangster rap- old school soul and funk- a little hip hop. Not into lots of newer stuff or bands. I am old enough to have seen many of these genres when first came out- seen many in concerts also- good to go.

Wishing you all- all the best.
 
Last edited:
Hi, my name is Alan. I fat fingered my user name and it should be VibeFmRadio, I have worked many jobs DJing and went solo for many years also did actual local radio roadshows and called it a day and hung up my headphones on live gigs around 2009, but teamed up with a few like minded people to start an online radio station and was hooked. I met a listener who later became a presenter on the station and we got married in 2011 and I now live in the USA east coast time zone and our current station is based in the UK. Looking forward to seeing whats available to us.
 
Hi - My name is Gerry - I spent the last year designing a very low cost Internet-Radio piece of hardware based on ESP32C3 that is pretty hardened now and works very well on almost all WiFi access points including hotspot in the car while driving. I'm interested in this whole new-to-me world of Internet Radio and perhaps how to collaborate with the radio-station side. I've got 16-bit CD quality output through a stereo jack and a full web-app interface running off the chip to tune through a map of the world and search over 44,000 stations that I pre-programmed into this thing. When I say low-cost I mean under $3.50 for the assembled circuit board. I retrofitted the circuit I designed into what looks like a stereo JBL speaker. It talks directly to WiFi and no need of phone pairing. Mine ONLY works with MP3 streams at the moment and not AAC, though I can get AAC but I need a better chip. I'd rather just stick with MP3 streams for now. Would this be of interest to anyone? I feel that at an extremely low cost it might open up the possibility of give-aways of hardware as a promotional item, which might get people tuning in more.
 
Hi - My name is Gerry - I spent the last year designing a very low cost Internet-Radio piece of hardware based on ESP32C3 that is pretty hardened now and works very well on almost all WiFi access points including hotspot in the car while driving. I'm interested in this whole new-to-me world of Internet Radio and perhaps how to collaborate with the radio-station side. I've got 16-bit CD quality output through a stereo jack and a full web-app interface running off the chip to tune through a map of the world and search over 44,000 stations that I pre-programmed into this thing. When I say low-cost I mean under $3.50 for the assembled circuit board. I retrofitted the circuit I designed into what looks like a stereo JBL speaker. It talks directly to WiFi and no need of phone pairing. Mine ONLY works with MP3 streams at the moment and not AAC, though I can get AAC but I need a better chip. I'd rather just stick with MP3 streams for now. Would this be of interest to anyone? I feel that at an extremely low cost it might open up the possibility of give-aways of hardware as a promotional item, which might get people tuning in more.
Any pics?
 
Any pics?
I just started a wordpress site (I havent even set up the sub-pages yet so just the front page is valid) a few days ago and there is a pic on the front page:



And here is a pic of my circuit board that fits into the speaker housing. I just pull out the bluetooth board and replace it with my own PCB. I dont mind showing it here since all the real hard work is in the coding itself, since it is an ESP32C3 with limited resources
 

Attachments

  • 20240908_174406B.jpg
    20240908_174406B.jpg
    75.3 KB · Views: 192
I just started a wordpress site (I havent even set up the sub-pages yet so just the front page is valid) a few days ago and there is a pic on the front page:



And here is a pic of my circuit board that fits into the speaker housing. I just pull out the bluetooth board and replace it with my own PCB. I dont mind showing it here since all the real hard work is in the coding itself, since it is an ESP32C3 with limited resources
I get it now. I assumed it was a device with a screen etc. so I get it only connects to the one station no way of searching for other, so if we gave it away it would be just for our station. The speaker is a case of pick whatever, then putting it in. Is that right?
 
I get it now. I assumed it was a device with a screen etc. so I get it only connects to the one station no way of searching for other, so if we gave it away it would be just for our station. The speaker is a case of pick whatever, then putting it in. Is that right?

It could be like that, but right now how it works is there are 4 buttons on the back side, a channel up button, up volume button, down volume, and channel down button. Each of those buttons, if held down for more than half second, becomes power button, preset-up button, preset-down button, and mode button. When you go to another channel, it announces (through the speaker) the call sign (or name) and frequency (if it is FM) of the station and if it is a new city, it spells out the city name on the speaker, then tunes the station. That's the button-navigation capability

There is also a web server right on the speaker that can be reached from a computer or phone on the same local network (like 192.168.0.X) , which gives a map of the world and little dots that are clickable representing various cities. Then there is another page on that speaker-hosted webserver that you can search keywords from all 43000 stations that have been pre-programmed into the speaker. And there is a control panel where you can set your 8 presets and up to 7 user-controlled custom stream links (which means almost all presets could be stations that aren't even pre-programmed in the flash)

My idea was to have lockable presets to make it easy for a user to find a specific station. So if you were an internet station you could lock the presets to your station, or half of them, or however you'd want to do that. But I could change the code to make the speaker only ever tune a single station. I will send a picture of some of the "virtual" screens
 
I get it now. I assumed it was a device with a screen etc. so I get it only connects to the one station no way of searching for other, so if we gave it away it would be just for our station. The speaker is a case of pick whatever, then putting it in. Is that right?
here are a few screenshots: (ok I admit color schemes are not my thing - but the functionality is all there on that chip now)
 

Attachments

  • Screenshot_20240909-141105_Chrome.jpg
    Screenshot_20240909-141105_Chrome.jpg
    707.4 KB · Views: 178
  • Screenshot_20240909-141124_Chrome.jpg
    Screenshot_20240909-141124_Chrome.jpg
    708.8 KB · Views: 195
  • Screenshot_20240909-141225_Chrome.jpg
    Screenshot_20240909-141225_Chrome.jpg
    782.7 KB · Views: 200
Top