Pandora Radio – Part 5

I got the LCD working over the long weekend. It fit the hole perfectly. There wasn't going to be enough room at the top of the case to mount the whole LCD / LCD driver board / Raspberry Pi stack up there without interfering with the operation of the radio's original buttons. So I mounted the driver board and the Pi to the bottom of the case, but ran leads up to the LCD at the top. From a software perspective, I've got the LCD displaying the track name and artist when the song changes, and I will probably setup one of the buttons to allow you to cycle through the backlight colors for the LCD.


Pandora Radio – Part 4

The photo didn't come out so great, but here's an update. The bushings I 3D printed worked out pretty well. It took a few tries to get the tolerances correct, but once I dialed them in they were a perfect fit. I still need to drill some holes in the knob shafts so I can add some sort of retaining pin to keep the knobs captured.

Pandora Radio – Part 3

Next up are the knobs. I am planning to reuse one of them as a volume control - I'm not sure if the other will just be for show. The knob shafts don't fit tightly in the holes in the case, so I am going to 3D print some bushings for them. Below is a video of the 3D printer in action!


Pandora Radio – Part 2

One of my first steps was to cut an opening behind the button area for a 2-line LCD from Adafruit that I'll use to display the artist and song title. I started by scoring the veneer with an exacto knife, then drilled some holes carefully and used a jig saw to cut out the rectangle. I filed the wood back to the scored line until the opening was exactly the right size for the LCD. The control board for the LCD will be mounted as a daughterboard on the Raspberry Pi I will used to run the whole thing.


Pandora Radio – Part 1

Years ago I bought an old Philco 39-17T tabletop radio with the intent of converting it to a slave set of speakers for attaching an external mp3 player. That project lingered a long time, and I never quite got around to it. Here are some pics of the original radio when I bought it. The outside was a little beat up, but repairable - but the inside was trashed.


And here are some photos or the restored shell of the radio. I refinished the case, replaced the grill cloth, and spray-painted the metal escutcheon plate. I've gutted the inside in preparation for the new innards.


Sean’s Road Trip – Part 4

Another of our stops was Hershey's Chocolate World in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Sean got to design his own chocolate bar (including a custom wrapper), and got to watch it move down the factory line. It was a bigger place than I expected from the website, but that was actually good. Sean thought the "Chocolate Tasting Adventure" we did was pretty fun too. He liked that we had to eat the chocolate so "fancy".


Sean’s Road Trip – Part 3

We also visited the Adventure Aquarium in Camden, NJ. It was pretty amazing, but we somehow neglected to take any pictures other than this one. Sean really dug this thing though - there were bubbles on the underside of the tank that he could pop up inside of and look around. It was pretty cool - I only wish I could have fit under there myself! All in all, it was great aquarium - I think I liked it even better than the one in Baltimore.

Sean’s Road Trip – Part 2

Another stop on our trip was at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. It was pretty cool in there - they had way more skeletons than I would have expected. Among the larger skeletons they had a brontosaurus, a triceratops, and a stegosaurus - but they also had a whole bunch of raptor-sized skeletons too (think Jurassic Park). Among the mammal skeletons they had a prehistoric elk with antlers nine feet across! The plaque said the antlers weighed more than the rest of the skeleton combined! They didn't allow any photos inside the museum, but we got this one from the outside.

Sean’s Road Trip – Part 1

The first stop on Sean's road trip was the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island. We didn't take many pictures, but that's only because we were having such a good time. But we did get one cute pic of this red panda lounging about. Looks like a pretty good thing he's got going on there.

42 Words of Wisdom: #18

Got this in a fortune cookie the other night - and immediately thought of Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover."