# Overview

Volumio based internet radio, controlled by NFC, built in an old speaker.

# Background

Inspired by the extreemly good looking Spotify Box and QR based systems like Audiosphere, I wanted to make something similar for my kids. I’ve earlier built a few radios based on small, cheap bluetooth speakers like music angel, but wanted something with better sound this time.

# Prototype

QR are fast and cheap, so I made a quick prototype. It turned out they are unreliable when there’s no display to give feedback on how the camera sees them. Both lighting and focus was a problem.

So here we are, Hell really has frozen over…

$ finger hell@graph.no
           -= Meteogram for norway/nord-trøndelag/stjørdal/hell
 'C                                                                   Rain (mm)
  0
 -1
 -2      ^^^^^^
 -3   ^^^      ^^^
 -4=--            ^^^^^^
 -5                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^                     ^^^^^^^^^
 -6                                    ------------=--=--^^^
 -7
 -8
 -9
    11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 Hour

     E  E  E  E  E  E SE  E  E  E  E  E  E  E  E  E  E SE SE SE SE SE Wind dir.
     2  2  3  4  3  2  2  2  3  3  3  4  4  3  3  3  3  3  3  3  4  3 Wind(mps)

 Legend left axis:   - Sunny   ^ Scattered   = Clouded   =V= Thunder   # Fog
 Legend right axis:  | Rain    ! Sleet       * Snow

# Overview

See RadiOS part 1.

So I started making a prototype to figure out if I could “sense” both selections with GPIO pins, while the designer started modeling and rendering suggestions for the physical design. The solution chosen was to first set all volume control pins to high, and check which channel control points registered as on, then reverse (control points high, check volumes).

# Sound

For sound we tore down a Music Angel portable speaker. It gave us two speakers, an amplifier running on 5V and a battery which we threw away. The built in soundcard gave horrible sound under certain conditions, so a cheap USB soundcard was used instead.

# Overview

If you’re doing this, you’re doing it wrong…:

2016-05-31 10:19:45.493314 Client 92.x.x.192 hamburg, germany/hamburg/hamburg
2016-05-31 10:19:48.443380 Client 74.x.x.189 greensboro, united_states/north_carolina/greensboro
2016-05-31 10:19:56.733260 Client 50.x.x.50 beaverton, united_states/oregon/beaverton
2016-05-31 10:19:56.745653 Client 50.x.x.50 beaverton, united_states/oregon/beaverton
2016-05-31 10:19:56.759656 Client 50.x.x.50 beaverton, united_states/oregon/beaverton
2016-05-31 10:19:56.819283 Client 50.x.x.50 beaverton, united_states/oregon/beaverton
2016-05-31 10:20:16.287744 Client 5.x.x.13 kaiserslautern, germany/rhineland-palatinate/kaiserslautern
2016-05-31 10:20:35.182942 Client 85.x.x.140 katowice, poland/silesia/katowice
2016-05-31 10:20:47.029550 Client 193.x.x.226 oslo, norway/oslo/oslo/oslo

Lots of people use the finger service @graph.no in an automated way. That’s quite alright, it’s what it’s there for. As an example:

# Overview

I meant to write this post in February, but never had the time.

Something exploded at Tuesday 2016-02-16.

I created the finger weather service in 2012, and announced it at Reddit. It got some mentions in Norwegian blogs, and i gathered a few regular users. See old stats in previous post.

I’m no fan of social media, and try to stay away. But apparently someone recently noticed the service and tweeted about it. Then blogs. Since I have regularly received “thank you” mails due to one of the random messages at the bottom (Mail a “thank you” to finger@falkp.no if you like the service.).