Developing my own radio station software for pirate rigs and online radio stations

If you look back through this blog and through the videos on my YouTube channel, you'll come across many projects involving my interest in pirate radio and hacking little FM transmitters. My favourite project being this one here, that involves the BBC Microbit and got featured in a Microbit magazine. These were all purely for experimental purposes, you understand.

Since those posts were written, I've also been looking at creating an online radio station and experiemented a bit with Number Station in the past, where every Sunday I would hop online and scan the airwaves for shortwave transmissions and overlay them on top of an ambient backing track. This taught me a great deal about the process of getting a station online.

I started looking around for software that would allow me to schedule shows but everything came at a price and the free solutions out there were either too complicated for my needs or didn't have what I wanted. So I'm writing my own.

This project is very rough at the moment, but it's working and providing a very simple and easy to use solution to my problem. This all runs in a browser, either on a computer or phone (or even something old that's been repurposed like an old Kindle device) making it truely versitile and portable. It can then be hooked into a transmitter or online streaming software.

The main feature is that it allows you to set up scheduling and I have sets scheduled every couple of hours. The name of each session and their time slots can be set up in the code.

Each show references a list of MP3 files and these are referenced further in the code.

The software is also able to read out announcements and name checks between each song and also reads out the name of each session when they're about to start. I have also added in addition sound clips to be played inbetween songs, in this case recordings of me pressing tape player buttons and swapping out cassette tapes.

One final feature that I've included is a Admin section, whereby the software allows you to enter in additional announcements which then get queued up and read out at suitable times throughout the set. This feature is password protected.

It's still extremely rough but a copy of the code can be found here. Enjoy!