The desktop charger for the FT60 has the following color LEDs when charging:
- amber – charger is on, no radio in dock (or not correctly seated)
- constant red – charging
- flashing red – almost charged
- green – fully charged
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The desktop charger for the FT60 has the following color LEDs when charging:
I had an idea to build an Arduino based radio alarm clock by re-purposing some other components I had lying around from other projects:
The only part missing was an FM radio tuner. I was wondering how easy it would be to build a radio tuner from scratch (but not sure how I’d control it via the Arduino), so decided to take the easy approach to get started and use a TEA5767 based FM tuner on a chip. To make it even easier, I got a TEA5767 based breakout board for $5 on ebay that includes two jacks, one for an antenna and one for audio out.
Simon Monk has an Arduino library for the TEA5767 that has one function call to set the tuner frequency.
So far, pretty easy going. I have a start on combining the LCD to display time and GPS coords here. Now to add the radio library, add some controls from the Pi Plate buttons, and I’m almost there!
There’s a range of cheap (< $20) USB Digital TV receivers that due to their wide tuning range can be used as Software Defined Radios (SDR) when combined with other software to tune and receive the signal from the dongle.
RTL chipset dongles are supported by open source software rtl-sdr. Download the source to your Pi and build following the instructions on their website. By running as follows:
rtl_tcp -a your_ip_address
you can stream the data received from the dongle inserted into your Pi to other software running elsewhere (your desktop/laptop) like SDR Sharp (by pointing it to the IP address of the Pi) which you can use to control the tuning of the dongle.