I think I mentioned this project in a previous post, if not here it goes: I plan to make a wireless, portable internet boombox from a bunch of parts I scrounged up/have had lying around my house for a while. I bought a Netgear WGT634U wireless router off of ebay for ~$30. The reason I went for this particular model is that it comes with a USB port on the router itself. This was really useful since it allowed me to buy a cheap USB sound card off of ebay (~$5). This, combined with an old Magnavox boombox that I have had for years, will form my wireless boombox. My goal is to have it be completely battery powered, but that may not be 100% feasible.

As soon as I got the router, I spent a few hours installing and configuring/playing with OpenWRT. Unfortunately the sound card shipped from Hong Kong, so I had to wait about a week for it to get here. It finally arrived yesterday and as soon as I got a chance today, I hooked it up and started streaming my music over the air.

There’s a picture of the setup I have so far. I took the top of the router off to start messing around with it and haven’t put it back on yet. That little thing jutting out of the back of the router is the USB sound card. The boombox does not have an aux in port, so for now I ripped apart a really old pair of head phones and attached the leads to the tape deck head. I don’t have long enough screwdrivers to take apart the boombox yet, but once I do I plan to take out the electronics for the cd player and enclose the router in the boombox. Also, I will attach the headphone leads more permanently (likely replacing the cd player module’s connections). The other thing I need to do is find an appropriate battery to power this set up as I would really like it to be truly wireless.

Once all of that is out of the way, the only thing left to do is to figure out how to control the thing. I plan on using mpd/mpc for the music player software, but having to ssh to the boombox to get it to play music somewhat defeats the purpose. The router does have a serial console port, so I may end up wiring the buttons on the boombox to change the song and use a c program to monitor it and trigger the appropriate mpc commands. Another option/additional feature might be setting up a very simple webpage that I could view from my phone that displays information about the current song and allows the various playback controls. I don’t have one of those fancy smart phones, but my phone should be able to support something like that. Besides that, I could also have a fancier AJAX-y web interface (but again, that seems to defeat the purpose). I am looking forward to finishing this thing up, but I have quite a bit of school work these next couple of weeks so I’ll see how it goes. The weather’s getting nicer outside so I’d really like to get this thing together and use it at a BBQ.