Saturday 29 June 2013

Sony Ericsson MMR-70 transmitter LED mod for Raspberri Pi

My Raspberry Pi based Internet Radio/Weather Station is going to get a new feature soon - an FM transmitter. You can buy a discontinued Sony Ericsson MMR-70 FM Transmitter for less than 2 EUR now and it can be connected to Raspberry Pi quite easily. Tobias Mädel has done excellent work putting together a small FMBerry daemon which can control MMR-70 connected to RPi's I2C bus. In this case Raspberri Pi is connected directly to I2C pins on Alps TSMZ1-603A FM transmitter (built on NS741 low power FM transmitter chip). Onboard Atmega 32-M is not used and forced to a sleep state to avoid any control conflicts.

MMR-70 has an LED, but it's connected to Mega32 pin 16, so a bit of high precision soldering is required :) To control the LED we need to solder wire directly to the LED or close to Mega32 pin 16:


Thursday 27 June 2013

Making Kodak Vest Pocket Special work again

Short photo-story about Kodak Vest Pocket Special I've got at a huge expense of 1 EUR and restored to perfectly working condition:


Original tick seal leather has gone, a lot of corrosion on aluminium cast body:

Saturday 15 June 2013

Making yet another Internet Radio project with Raspberry Pi

For years I've been using my old looking replica of Bush TR82 radio to listen our local radio stations, but recently I decided to push its reception limits a bit further and upgraded it with help of Raspberry Pi to an Internet Radio.

So, with some extra components from a few broken things now it looks like this:
Actually, it is not just a radio anymore - it is a weather station as well :) It monitors and displays current temperature, pressure and relative humidity. Why? Just because after connecting screen and control buttons I still had a few IO pins available plus it will help me in future to build intelligent house heating system