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Little Radio Hacking

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sam, 01/12/2008 - 23:13 — Sofian

I bought a small FM radio at the local Dollarama for 1 CAD. It has a volume knob / switch and three buttons: reset (I dunno what this is but I guess it resets to the first channel on the FM band), scan (goes to the next available channel) and light (activates a small light).

I did a little experiment where I just replaced the sound output by a light-emitting diode (LED), resulting in a light-producing devide that generates light according to the sound of the radio. It adds a strange feel to the object. I suppose this strategy could be used in the street: one would wonder what activates the LED. And it's pretty cheap, the only problem in that respect being that it's battery-powered (requires two AAA batteries).

Commentaires

lun, 01/14/2008 - 14:44 — Samuel

First of all...I'm not

First of all...I'm not realy understand...would you use radio sound and light in same time ?

  • we can use smd led ( take less batterie juice more brightness)
  • With small amp the sound radio will be enough powerful.

By the way... it's easy to control the radio by attiny13 Ir communication. ; )

sam, 01/12/2008 - 23:26 — Sofian

Light problems

There's two issues with the LED that would need to be addressed. First, the light is not strong enough, it's pretty faint. This is probably due to the low voltage at this point and could most probably be resolved by reducing the resistance at the start of the circuit or by adding an amplifier at the end.

The other problem is that the light is not always very varying. It depends on the station and since I've removed the headphones it's hard to tell if this is due to the radio channel itself outputing "flat" sound or if it's a deeper problem. I have found out that the problem does not arise for all radio channels. In the cases where it worked well, the light was usually also more vivid, which tells me that this problem might also be party resolved by making the light brighter.