PiDAB Progress Report 1

I’m working on building a DAB+ radio to replace the one that I have in our bathroom. The one we have is not terrible, but there are some things that I don’t like. Also, it does not have the few features that I really want, and I am not aware of any commercial solutions for them:

• Fast startup: I want the radio to turn on when I press the “on” button and not need seconds to start playing.
• Play last episode: I want easy access to the last episode of periodic programmes that I like.

My radio will be based on a Raspberry Pi and a FM/DAB tuner module manufactured by Keystone. This module implements a headless radio with a serial interface for control.

To get started quickly, I got myself the MonkeyBoard development board. It contains a serial to USB converter based on a PIC microprocessor as well as some additional circuitry to control the headphone output. No drivers were needed for macOS, and the radio just shows up as a standard serial port on the USB host. I had to inquire with MonkeyBoard to get the documentation for the module and the serial board, and they quickly sent over schematics, source code for their sample application and libraries as well as the description of the serial protocol.

The libraries provided by MonkeyBoard did not compile on macOS right away. Even though porting would not have been too difficult, I decided that I rather want to implement the serial protocol. This gives me another opportunity to learn Modern C++ and discover how the language has evolved over the 15 years that I have not been using it.

One Modern C++ library that comes in particularly handy when dealing with the serial protocol of the radio is Magic Enum C++. It provides compile-time reflection on enums which allows me to print the symbolic names of command codes exchanged with the radio module in debug output.

I’m publishing the code to this project on GitHub. Follow the repository or watch this space for updates.