ESP32 Internet Radio & Weather Station

During school holidays or even weekends my wife spends more time in the kitchen. To not to be so quite she asked for an FM radio. No big deal but the bloody radio signal is not strong enough in our kitchen. The normal FM radio we bought, couldn't find clear radio stations so we decided to buy an internet radio and listen any stations we like.

The first radio was quite good except all the time we turned it off it forgot the saved stations. Also sometimes the wifi password was gone too.

It was from amazon so we returned it and we choose another one.

During this torture I challenged myself "am I able to build one".

First I tried it with a raspberry Pi but it wasn't cost effective in this situation and run an operating system just to listen radio it's a bit too much I think.

I ended up with an esp32 dual core wifi module.

It turned out the internet radio is not a simple project, especially if I want to add a nice screen and a weather station too.

The main ingredients:

-Esp32 (lolin32)

-My smart screen with FT810

-VS1053 mp3 decoder

-Rotary encoder

-IR receiver

-PAM8610 amplifier

-Audio Transformers 600 : 600

-2x 2way speakers

I designed and made my wooden box for the radio and placed the parts inside.

I used Edzelf's internet radio code as my base and I modified it. https://github.com/Edzelf/ESP32-Radio

I've implemented my FT810 video processors code into his code and I added the openweathermap.org website's API code as well.

After that I designed the look of the screen. ( it was changed few times :) )

I added later external wifi antenna to increase the reliability.