WoopeFi - Project by Riccardo Strobbia And Yaniv Steiner.

What is WoopeFi?

WoopeFi strands for Wooden Penguin (Wi-Fi Enabled).
A high-quality Streaming Mp3 player based on Linux-Debian, embedded inside a classic radio. WoopeFi is an Italian project, and due to that should be pronounced Woo- Pi - Fai. (Anyway that’s how we say it).

Why: Having a laptop or a desktop in your living room while playing music directly from your mp3 server is a cool thing, still the interface is the laptop and that’s not very cool.
How about we use the same setup (Wi-Fi mp3 and all) and just replace the controls with an old classic radio, something nice to have in the living room with its yellow warm light.

We assumed that the first part would be to take the radio apart, removing all the unnecessary electronics…

We where lucky to have such a wonderful panel with old Italian stations including the Vaticano Radio and other cool places.

We where also amazed to see how easy it will be to interface to the old radio buttons, after all they are made in the Old faction way, and the connectors are large and easy to resolder.

The idea is very simple, we programmed our Linux box to run a macro (a command) using a single key press, for example pressing the letter Z on the keyboard will invoke the command “mpc play” (a command that will tell the music player to press “PLAY”) and play the music. From there and by hacking a keyboard we will bind the radio keys to send a single keyboard command and therefore invoke an action such as play or stop.

Hacking a keyboard is simple and fun, all you need is an old keyboard and a soldering iron, in this page we are not going to get into this technique, nevertheless you can find a very clear example and information about hacking a keyboard here

In the picture above - “A” is the keyboard we hacked “B” is the old radio Interface and “C” is 5V power feed to the original radio lamps.

The Father The Son And The Holy Linux.

After three Nights of works we have our first WoopeFi Prototype up and running.
We maps the five radio keys to Play,Next,Stop,Vol+,Vol-.
For now playlists and other setting are done by a remove pc computer running MPD commander.

shopping list:

Old computer, say a Pentium 400MHZ or better – (We found two in the trash, Luckily for us they are classic Olivetti computers)

Sound Card – (We are using a ‘Build on Board’ Creative card).

Wi-Fi PCI card – (if you don’t have a Wi-Fi Hub at home you can use a simple Ethernet card,
In this project we are using Netgear MA311)

This project is based on the Debian 3.1 Sarge operating system - download it from here - we suggest the full DVD sets.

Follow the installation steps making sure of you install Apache web server (Apache2) and Samba server.

After the installation simply mount your windows mp3s directories on the Linux box with Samba and install mpd (Music Player Daemon - simple as that).
last install MPC mpc.

Special Thanks to:
Patrizia Lo Cigno