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Make an amazing $6 digital radio with an old ESP8266 and a VS1053 decoder

As always, before I begin my description, I’d like to give credit to the original creators of this project. It’s called Ka-Radio and there’s an instructable here, Hackaday here, and GitHub here. The Instructable/Hackaday try their best to explain how to make the radio, but I suspect they’re written by engineers who aren’t too comfortable in English. Details are very sparse - especially when it comes to flashing the ESP. It’s a great project though, and all credit goes to those who created it.

Many of the posts on Ka-Radio’s Facebook page are in Russian - often by people who have already made the device and want to show off the fancy case they’ve constructed.

Unfortunately, for a comprehensive explanation for people who aren’t engineers, GitHub isn’t any better. The information is there but you need to jump from one place to another to understand which files to use, how to use them, and what’s the latest version.

So, the purpose of this blog is to explain how to make the device in one, concise, and easily comprehendible description.”

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