wifi radio

TTL header to adapter to serial com port

A while back, i found this project on line, where this guy (MightyOhm), teaches you how to make a wifi radio, out of a wireless router. It is a very interesting project, me and my son thought that we could do it just as a summer project. so we went and got this cheap ASUS router, open it up and solder the serial headers on the board. We didn't realise that the computer can not directly communicate with the router since the voltage levels are different, but as expected the mightyohm site tells you all about it and even which cable adapter to get. After connecting the router to the pc we could see the router's output on a computer terminal.

The hardest part was to compile the image and flash it after we got he OpenWrt Source.( basically over writing the custom firmware OpenWRT to a ASUS WL-520GU Wireless Router ) Which in Leiman's terms becomes a Linux box. 

After the OpenWRT is installed, we can add programs to the router like a music player client and server; to play music via a usb sound card connected to some cheap pc speakers that i had laying around. The sound card is listed in the website as well. It is a pretty awesome project, like i said. 

The last part of the project which is not required since you can use your computer terminal to view the song information. For this we used an Arduino UNO board with a lcd screen. there are plenty of sample sketches to run on the Arduino uno with lcd, but you have to take in account that some are for 4 line lcd and there are some fancy sketches out there that can scroll the text if it is bigger than the screen size. we didn't connect any potentiometers (knobs) to the arduino to control volume or change stations, since we got a little lazy at the end.

These are pictures and video of our attempt to make this project.  It was an amazing experience, one always wonder what can be done with this little router, and usb port... and my son and i had fun making it and this it is a cool project.