FM radio with RDS - your ideas for HW

[BlueWave]

Currently we are looking for some HW solution for FM radio with RDS. Do you have any experience and recommend ready to use solution?



Our requirements are:

- radio demodulation is made on HW board not by SW on RPI

- the best would be USB connection ( not necessary )

- simply settings commands support

- digital audio, rds signal as output



So far we have checked:

- RTL- SDR

- Radio module TEA5767

[Vitalic]

As i aleady answered in here.

https://bluewavestudio.io/community/show...hp?tid=679

Ordered one. Looks promising.

[BlueWave]

It really looks good. We are wondering if all signal processing for FM is done inside dongle.



Let us know when you will get it.

[BlueWave]

@Vitalic did you get and test this dongle? what are your thoughts?

[Chrisfromwa]

What help do you need in testing for FM radio in the US?

I would like to have something that also supports RDS.

[BlueWave]

We would like to sum-up the ideas:



As you can see there is no many ideas from users site. We have made a lot of testing with SDR and it does not work, as it generates to much CPU load, other common chips are also not sufficient as audio handling cause some issues, you have to use audio output as antenna or there is lack of RDS/RDBS etc.( like in TEA5767).



Therefore we have started this topic to get some ideas... there was one interesting thing from Vitalic, however after deeper research we doubt it works according to our requirements. Would be good if @Vitalic could let us know.



We do not want to drop this idea, and we are aware that FM radio with RDS can be important to some users. Therefore we would like to consider our own small HW based on this chip: si4704 , as there is no boards available. It is successfully used in commercial products and offers exactly what we need. However we have to estimated the cost and check if this investment will success at all (development costs, testing, prototyping, production ). One of the solution would be to put it on Kickstarter, where we can get direct feedback regarding level of interest from users.



Of course we are still open for other solutions.

[Chrisfromwa]

We do not want to drop this idea, and we are aware that FM radio with RDS can be important to some users.  Therefore we would like to consider our own small HW based on this chip: si4704 , as there is no boards available. It is successfully used in commercial products and offers exactly what we need. However we have to estimated the cost and check if this investment will success at all (development costs, testing, prototyping, production ). One of the solution would be to put it on Kickstarter, where we can get direct feedback regarding level of interest from users.

Of course we are still open for other solutions.

I looked at the thread from Vitalic,  the item he purchased appeared to be a DAB streaming type of thing.  Not something that would work for us in the US.  Plus I would really prefer a non streaming solution,  for those times we don't have our phone or it died,  or just don't have a great internet connection,  that our head unit still has a function.  That's where a true FM receiver comes into play. 

As for your idea with si4704 it looks promising,  but would really need to know what the final costs would be. 

But looking up the chip it does appear to do what we all need.  

Is there anyway that you guys could do an analysis of costs, and get back to us?  I would be willing to do a kickstarter,  especially if early adopters could get a small break in costs.

[Vitalic]

Still waiting for the dongle...



Will give feedback asap.

[BlueWave]

External 'Radio FM with RDS' hardware for Raspberry PI?



Let us know your thoughts:



https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQ...sp=sf_link

[rubenverhoef]

I think the best way to implement this is:

- Make a dedicated MP3 player for OAP (so we can also use a mp3 player to play music from a USB?)

- Use welle-cli backend for streaming dab radio (it can stream a mp3 file from a dab+ channel) I tested this and works fine!

- Use an implementation like: https://github.com/AlbrechtL/rtl_fm_streamer to stream fm to the mp3 player



The only hard things to do is make a search script to search for channels. For DAB+ this is easy, fm I don't know.

Also for dab streaming you have to change channel before streaming the mp3 so there is need for a little more code than only the mp3 player (ofcource).



This all can used with a simple sdr receiver which is cheap and works great.