Some pictures of what I got

I found the radio fully working in a flea market for 2€. :)
The WeMos D1 mini costs 3€, the VS1053 8€ (but there are cheaper models).

From the original radio, I'll keep the two speakers. Although they're not the best ones you could dream of, they'll do the job for the moment. I may be able to re-use the buttons and rotary knobs (they work as spammers-buttons : each time you rotate a little, it's like a button is pushed). I'll get rid of the cramped screen, as I have a nice LCD 20x4 I2C screen waiting in a box.
But this pleather is so nice, and the size is just perfect ! Plus, there's quite some room inside.

Here's some pictures. I wasn't lying : it's really a kitchen table. I mean, in which other table would you put a tablecloth full of little cakes ? :D

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Flashing an STM32 "Blue Pill"

Flashing this STM32 "Blue Pill" board took me 5 hours. I finally recieved my microcontrollers. I have at disposal : A brand new WeMos D1 Mini (it's a smallish NodeMCU) An Arduino Pro Mini (it acts just like a Leonardo, but it lacks some interesting pins sadly :( ) An STM32F103C8T6, I'll call this the Blue Pill for short. The Arduino Pro Mini has an Arduino bootloader out-of-the-box, so I could play with it directly. It's nice ! Still, it lacks the double Serial of the original Leonardo, and most importantly, there's no A4 and A5 pins, so libraries for I2C won't work without modification. But the Blue Pill needs more work. Basically, I followed the instructions on this site : http://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Installation Since it's quite complicated, consider the following as a tutorial to set up your Blue Pill. I tried different things, the following has worked for me. Before doing anything software-related, while reading the B...

KaRadio DVT-01

I packed everything in my little case. It's really a mess in there, with cables flying around and every card floating, not fixed on the inside. But it looks quite cool ! I removed the old radio antenna to use its hole to pass my USB cable. Here's how it looks ! As you can see, I let the rotary knob (it's a simple angular potentiometer, in fact) from the amplifier out. It holds with a little nut that was provided with it. The buttons you can see are all fakes, they belonged to the old radio and I forgot to remove them (in fact they're simply glued to the back). Maybe I'll find some tools to make a nice-looking front panel when my stuff arrives. I'll ask people around me to lend me their tools... In the end, the radio would have a 20x4 LCD screen to display artist + title and useful infos (like the IP or the volume when you change it from the website, maybe). I think I'll need two more buttons to change the station. I won't...

Anti-optimization, hardware crumbling apart, GitHub

Today, short post about deceiving software. Remember when last time, I said I had to do optmizations on my code ? Well I tried. And it went worse than I expected ! First, I tried to gather similar codes in some tasks, but it came out they were too heavy for FreeRTOS to handle them correctly, resulting in heap panic... So trying to enhance my code, I worsen it ! So I hard to roll it back. Then, I tried to implement real mutexes for some resources that are shared among the tasks, in particular the screen (and maybe the UART one day, but I can manage to use it only in one task, if I split it in several functions). When I though I understood it and implemented it correctly, it turned out to make the STM32 crash at bootup, and being non recognizable by my PC anymore ! So again, I had to rollback to the previous version. I'm still trying to figure out how to re-design my code, while keeping it runnable on that picky Blue Pill. You can FINALLY find my code on Github ! I suggest ...

Electronics on the kitchen table

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