Arduino WebRadio player

There are a thousand of radio stations are broadcasting music/reviews/interviews over the internet. To listen these radio stations you will need a personal computer or tablet or smartphone or a stand alone web radio player.

The circuit I have designed is an inexpensive web radio player with high quality stereo sound.

The WebRadio player is controlled by two switches for going to the next or previous radio station. That WebRadio has 14 pre-defined radio stations that can be replaced with the radio stations of your choice by re-programming the modified sketch to the arduino pro mini.

So far, the WebRadio player supports sound streams up to 64-kbps (audio streams over internet). Choosing radio stations that broadcasts AAC sound streams instead of mpeg (mp3) will give you the best sound quality.

The WebRadio player successfully managed to play 320 kbps mp3 audio streams that are stored on my local network!

The circuit

The circuit is constituted by a few components (as I use to do in my electronic circuits). Most of components are modules that can be assembled among them with a few wires. The modules are:

Arduino pro mini: The hart of the circuit.
ENC28J60 ethernet module. Connects the circuit to the internet
VS1053B. Decodes the audio streams from the webradio servers and leads the sound to the speakers.
Nokia 5110 LCD module. Displays the information about the webradio station (station name, bit rate, etc)

The arduino sends a request to a WebRadio server through the ethernet module (ENC28J60). The ENC28J60 is connected to the webradio server, sends the request and waits for response from the server. The response will be the header information of the radio station followed by the audio stream (mp3, aac etc). The arduino gets the answer from the server and sends the received data to the VS1053B mp3, aac, wma decoder. The VS1053B automatically recognizes the kind of the received format, decodes it and outputs it to the speakers. On LCD is appeared the WebRadio station number (1-14) and the first 122 characters of the server header response.

The WebRadio audio streams header

A typical response from an ICECAST server is like the following data


                                 
                                    
                                       ICY 200 OK
                                    
                                 
                                 icy-notice1:<BR>This stream requires <a href="https://www.winamp.com/">Winamp</a><BR>
                                 
                                    icy-name:Ellinikosfm Radio www.ellinikosfm.com GREECE GREEK HELLAS INTERNATIONAL LAIKA RADIO
                                 
                                 
                                    icy-genre:Greek
                                 
                                 
                                    icy-url:https://www.ellinikosfm.com
                                 
                                 
                                    content-type:audio/mpeg
                                 
                                 
                                    icy-pub:1
                                 
                                 
                                    icy-metaint:32768
                                 
                                 
                                    icy-br:128
                                 
                                 icy-notice2:SHOUTcast Distributed Network Audio Server/Linux v1.9.8<BR>
                                  
                                 (-= it follows the audio data =-)
                                  Π¦«p‘I8 b Z ΰ ΄~X¬ ƒ TDΈτΡ|αQ Ψ"sϊ[,f¬μΙϋτ ;²m!Ϋ+mΖϊY�r�Ξ¤» ¤c)f MζΣ»ιOϊ§�…χ?Σ{/  L EΞέ t€Bε…›1AFΰΈθsΰ ¬ †ΎU ΕηΡ κ! (oΠJ�¤ςu Ωέtό \6c^Ϊΰ¨„@ύ s3,hDΧNq$©PO}«cϋυrµώ†ι±j   B# I9€-.............


                              
                                 icy-name: is the webradio station name
                              
                              icy-metaint: Every 32768 transmitted bytes, the server will transmit an additional information string. For example transmits the song name that is playing now.
                              icy-br: The baud rate of the audio stream. In our example the baud rate is 128 kilo bits per second (kbps).
                               
                               
                               
                              
                                 Adding your favorite webradio stations
                              
                               
                              Open the  https://www.internet-radio.com/ web site and select a radio station with 64-kpbs. Then copy the port and IP number of the icecast server.
                               
                               
                               
                              
                               
                               
                               
                              Open the WebRadio_player.ino sketch and change the IP and Port numbers you copied previously. Then, re-program the sketch to arduino pro mini and ... that's it!
                              Your favorite station was added to the WebRadio player !
                              The final step is to try playing the stream. The WebRadio player doesn't have big RAM buffer. That will cause some delays in audio playing in case the internet connection between the server and the webplayer is not fast enough.

William Dudley had made some modifications to the webradio player by adding new features.

The new sketch (WebRadio_player.20141120.ino) is included in to the Arduino_WebRadio_player.zip file above.

- Last selected radio station is stored in eeprom for retrieving back after next power ON.