Paragon Project: A Raspberry Pi World Radio

One of my favorite websites is radio.garden, which allows you to find radio stations from all over the world. You can listen to radio stations in Brazil, Kuwait, and North Korea. With this project, you’ll be able to do exactly that, but with an actual radio and a Raspberry Pi. It’s a Raspberry Pi world radio.

Over on reddit, a user with the very creative name of trustMeIAmANinja posted this Retro World Radio project.

And I, for one, am thrilled to finally have the interface to match my love of world radio.

Hardware

The first thing you’re going to need is either a Raspberry Pi 3 or Raspberry Pi 4.

You’ll also need to find an old radio and some rotary encoders to work as the dials. The encoders will allow you to control the volume and make it possible to traverse the globe.

And then you’ll need a screen and an audio HAT to hook up to the Raspberry Pi.

The venerable trustMeIAmANinja also uploaded a picture of the internal set up:

Once you’ve got the screen and audio HAT connected to the Raspberry Pi, then you’ll also need to determine the speaker you want for the radio. You can faintly see an example in the picture above.

In this instance, the hardware setup will require a bit of wiring knowledge, but something that you can certainly manage even if you don’t have a degree in electrical engineering.

Software

When it comes to software, things get even simpler.

Since these are all internet radio stations, you have to set up WiFi on the Raspberry Pi.

Although the code isn’t up on GitHub yet (coming soon!), trustMeIAmANinja clarified in the comments that the rotary encoders build revolves around Henryk Plötz’s Raspberry Pi encoder code. And this is a super reliable way of hooking up encoders to a Raspberry Pi.

That gives you four dials: one to travel north and south, one for east and west, one to zoom in and out of the globe, and one to control the volume.

Then you can easily set up an API with a website like radio.garden and you’ll be ready to go!

Conclusion

I can promise that nothing quite puts you in the mood to travel like listening to radio stations from another country. So you can go put on radio.garden while you put this project together and dream about future travels.

Go check out more details about the Raspberry Pi world radio here.

(Edit, September 6th, 2023: trustMeIAmANinja uploaded both the documentation and the code. Check them out!)

Go check out more Paragon Projects that we’ve featured by clicking here.

You could also check out more ideas about how to produce music with Raspberry Pis by reading our article about sound output on the Pico W.

But now the million-dollar question is which country’s radio are you going to listen to?

I’m off to Uzbekistan!