“Dear friends welcome to another Instructable! Today we are going to build an Internet Radio device with a big 3.5” display using an inexpensive ESP32 board. Believe it or not, we can now build an Internet Radio in less than 10 minutes and with less than 30$. There is a lot to cover so, let’s get started!
A few months ago, I completed an Arduino FM Radio project which works great and looks even better in my opinion. If you want to see how I built this project you can read the Instructable here. The problem is that, although this radio looks cool it is not practical because I live in a small town in southern Greece and the big Greek radio stations I prefer to listen to, do not have transmitters around here. So, I listen to my favorite radios online on my laptop or tablet pc which is also not so practical. So, today I am going to build an Internet radio device in order to be able to listen to my favorite radio stations from all over the world!
As you can see, a first version of the project is ready on a breadboard. Let’s power it up. As you can see the project connects to the Internet and then streams music from predefined Radio Stations.
I have tuned in to the Real FM radio station from Athens and by using these buttons we can change the Radio Station we are listening to. I have saved my favorite radio stations to the memory of the ESP32 so I can access them easily. With this potentiometer, I can change the volume of the speaker. I display the Name of the Radio Station we are listening to on a big 3.5” display with a retro User Interface. The project works fine and it is very easy to build.
You can build the same project in less than 10 minutes but you need to have some experience. If this is your first project, consider building a simpler one first, to gain some experience. Check my Instructables for simple project ideas and when you are more comfortable with the Arduino the electronics come back to build this cool project. Let’s now start building our own Internet Radio.”