[Florian Amrhein] made use of some old hardware to build his own internet radio in a 1930′s radio case.

The original hardware is a tube-amplified radio which he picked up on eBay. There’s tons of room in there once he removed the original electronics and that’s a good thing because he crammed a lot of new parts into the build. The main one being an old laptop he had on hand. It’s got a 10″ screen which is too large for the opening, but that ended up being okay. He coded an interface with C and SDL which give him a visual representation of his favorite online streams. The knob to the right moves the red line when turned and causes the Debian box to change to the new stream using the Music Player Daemon. Two potentiometers control the tuning and volume, and there is also a rotary encoder which is not yet in use. All three are connected to the laptop via an Arduino.

Check out the finished product in the video after the break. It sounds quite good thanks to the small automotive speaker and amplifier also crammed into the old case.

If you don’t have a laptop lying around to use in a project like this consider a microcontroller and character LCD based system.

Here’s some amazing work from maker Blair Kelly:

Arduino Wifly Mini is a remotely operated vehicle that communicates over a WiFi network, can be controlled with an XBOX 360 or PS3 controller, or G27 steering wheel, or any other controller that can be manipulated with Processing’s ProControll library, and features force-feedback and a first-person view. Presently only the G27 wheel and a Logitech F510 controller rumble properly with force-feedback.

My favorite part is that the point-of-view camera inside the car can be set to pan in the direction that you’re steering so that you can see where you’re going. I also love that he implemented force feedback to the controller triggered from sensors on the car. If you’d like to know how he did it all, boy are you in luck. Blair documented this project in incredible detail. Nice work!

Hi

I sort of started this question on another page, but I thought I'd move it here so I'm not hijacking someone else's page.

2 questions here;

1: I'm looking to move from using picaxe to Arduino. Can anyone give me any pointers on where to start? (I know this question's probably been asked elsewhere on LMR)

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