Raspberry Pi Radio

[Zema Bus]

I'm too far away to listen the LA talk radio station I've listened to since my 20's so that just leaves listening over the Internet. I wanted something low power that could be on all day in the background, like a radio. I looked into "Internet radios", but they all looked clunky to use and the ratings weren't great for any of them. I had a few Raspberry Pi's lying around I've had for years, so I got a $35 six inch screen, hooked a Raspberry Pi up to it, and voila! A fraction of the price of one of those Internet radios and a lot easier to use

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RaspberryPi_Inernetradio0.jpg (244.01 KiB) Viewed 978 times

[Grogan]

That's pretty cool, and it would be good to have a little screen like that to go with a Raspberry Pi anyway.

It does look funny though, little tiny device (smaller than that screen obscuring it) with a big keyboard, mouse and speakers sticking out of it

Is that the Raspbian distro on it?

[Zema Bus]

With all the peripherals sticking out does look kind of funny It's a touch screen, but not really that useful for this.

Yeah it's the "Raspberry Pi OS", they used to call it Raspbian but renamed it at some point. I used the Raspberry Pi Imager in Arch to download the latest image and write it to the SD card. An older installation I had didn't have sound from the headphone jack, which I read was a known bug about 5 years ago but fixed since then. I was going to try a different distro but this one is working and serves the purpose so I might just leave it. Only change I made was setting it to dark mode. That's the default wallpaper they're using now.

[Grogan]

The touchscreen would be useful if you made a desktop shortcut with the direct URL to the radio station feed (or to the page where you click to start it).

OK, so I was confused about that. I'd heard of both, "Raspberry Pi OS" and Raspbian but didn't realize they were the same. I'd agree that it's best to use a distro specialized for running on the Raspberry Pi and the most mainstream one is likely the one you're going to have less trouble with. It's not the kind of device you want to tinker with software on or recompile everything

[Zema Bus]

Here's how to install Gentoo and LFS on a Raspberry Pi

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/How_to_ins ... berry_Pi_5

https://intestinate.com/pilfs/

[Grogan]

In the former case, Gentoo, you install binaries right on the device's SD card, and configure things. Looks pretty easy, actually. To me it's pointless (why Gentoo then?) but you don't have to compile anything at all on Gentoo anymore, they have complete binaries for everything.

In the latter case, LFS, you're compiling on the Raspberry Pi ("no cross compiling"). I honestly didn't expect that, I figured you'd build it on a PC and make an image to blast on. How silly

[Zema Bus]

Btop on the Raspberry Pi (via ssh):

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[Grogan]

A quad core ARM processor and 8 Gb of RAM, maybe compiling wouldn't be so bad on that thing. However, big things like Firefox you'd want to install binaries (you'd need more RAM than you've got to compile that nowadays, you'd have working data in swap)

I should get one of those just for hooking up to the TV to watch shows. My nephew always brings his laptop for that.

[Zema Bus]

I recently picked up a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB RAM, I've been wanting to get one to check out and thought I'd do that before the tariffs potentially become a factor. They're said to be a huge improvement over the Pi 4's. I haven't gotten to it yet but I got it as a kit that includes a case. I'll probably connect it to the TV, I used to do that with a Pi 4 running Manjaro.

[Grogan]

Something like this, then:
https://www.amazon.ca/iRasptek-Starter- ... VVASJUHTTD

There's a bigger kit there for $200, but it's just the 8 Gb ones with 64G storage.

Or this one, a more complete kit, but it's only got 64G storage:
https://www.amazon.ca/RasTech-Raspberry ... VVASJUHTTD

[Zema Bus]

Yeah that first one is the one I got, $195 US. That 2nd one with the 64 GB SD card should be good for most uses and you could always get a bigger SD card later.

[Grogan]

That second one is a different company "RasTech" vs. iRasptek. It seems to just come with more cables (two HDMI, another USB-C) AND the Operating System: says "Windows" (but it doesn't look like it actually comes with it, or they would say that. So that's probably moot, it should be the same hardware, it's all on the SoC). So that can find a home up someone's ass.

I think I'd go with my first link, the iRasptek starter kit (especially since that's the one you got).

[Grogan]

I've been thinking, if I do get one of these, I wouldn't be happy with the OS and I'd need to put something better on there. Arch has an aarch64 port, but as far as I can see it doesn't support Raspberry Pi 5. Apparently the bootloader they use on ARM is incompatible (because the ARM64 Cortex A76 can't boot in 32 bit mode). You have to use a different boot loader AND drop in a kernel that supports the hardware. It can be done with some finagling, but it doesn't look like fun to get Arch going on a Pi 5.

See, those debian OSes are a pain in the ass for my methods. I'd have to install the dev environment and all the corresponding -dev packages for everything I need to compile against. I would need to at least compile Mesa (need video codecs that debianal distros wouldn't provide anymore), ffmpeg, mpv etc. for it to be viable for a movie watching device, for me. On Arch I wouldn't have to compile much of anything (though it provides the environment out of the box if I do), except that I would try my hand at building a kernel on ARM.

[Zema Bus]

I'm not familiar with it but RaspArch might be a possibility until vanilla Arch has better support. I noticed they mention EndeavourOS, that one I used to run the X86_64 version of, it was pretty close to vanilla Arch with a couple additional repositories.

[Grogan]

Now that looks really good, I could get along with LxQT preinstalled. I'd have access to arch's aarch64 stuff that way too.

Now I want to do this! (but shouldn't spend the money at this time... like that ever stops me, though)

[Zema Bus]

I wasn't sure what I'd want to use for my Pi 5 but I think I'll go with that as well

[Grogan]

I pulled the trigger on this:
https://www.amazon.ca/iRasptek-Starter- ... VVASJUHTTD

With Prime discounts it came to $279.99 + tax = $316.39 CAD

I should have it on Wednesday

[Zema Bus]

Awesome!

[Grogan]

.. and got it, t showed up at 12:30. I haven't opened the box yet though, I have to get that Crux setup in order before I start screwing around with this project.