DAB Radio

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Why not repurpose obsolete smartphones as DAB metadata displays? (libretechni.ca)

submitted 5 days ago by nonserf@libretechni.ca to c/dabradio@feddit.uk

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Most DAB radios I find¹ have text-only displays. Some even have no display at all and you must tune in blindly with arrow buttons. Apparently color graphical LCDs increase the cost of the radio enough to omit them from the design.

And yet at the same time people are throwing away quite functional smartphones in mass quantity (thanks to capitalism and designed obsolscence).

Also note that (most?) DAB radios have a USB port for attaching a drive holding music.

Wouldn’t it be sensible to create a DAB radio with no display, but with the possibility to connect a smartphone which runs an app to show station metadata? (Would also be useful if it could connect to the LAN to feed metadata and even accept commands, but that’s another discussion)

I also suspect existing radios could be hacked. That is, radio flashed to decode the signal metadata and (for ease) write it to USB mass storage, which a smartphone can mimick while running an app to display the data that lands on the SD card. The problem would be phones refuse to simultaneously mount external storage that is externally mounted. Could a rooted phone read-only mount an SD partition that is externally mounted? Perhaps the mass storage hack is a broken idea, in which case we would need to invent a protocol for this. Or does a suitable protocol exist?

¹ I say this as a locally buying (usually 2nd-hand) type of consumer. Online consumers might have a different experience.

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[–] i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Interesting idea, but it sounds like it's increasing complexity for little benefit. What you might want is an SDR, which I believe you can get working on a phone.

[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If we throw away old smartphones and we also produce radios that will be wasted by consumers after realising their radio lacks some metadata like album art that can be upgraded with another radio purchase, there is an e-waste problem that SDR does not fully solve. You seem to imply that a typical smartphone that comes stock without radio hardware could run an SDR. Is that correct? Wouldn’t the phone at least need some hardware to use the headphone jack as antenna input? Looks like additional hardware is needed.

If a radioless smartphone can do the job without additional hardware, then it would mostly render my idea useless; but we’d have to neglect the fact that radios also have speakers that are better than that of a smartphone.

[–] i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Honestly I don't know, but I think there is SDR software for Android and therefore potentially DAB decoding software. It should only need an SDR and a USB-OTG cable.

[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 1 points 7 hours ago

It should only need an SDR and a USB-OTG cable.

The SDR would be just software, so what would OTG cable lead to? Or if you mean it needs hardware to support the SDR, then that would defeat the purpose of recycling obsolete hardware. AFAICT, the only way to receive radio on a smartphone without buying hardware is if the phone comes with a radio from the factory. My phones have FM radio, which I think is a bit rare.