I replaced Spotify with a homemade FM radio station

Source: Hacker News

In the interests of reducing my screen time and phone use, I ended up spending far too many hours glued to my laptop trying to build a custom FM radio station.

As part of a wide-ranging quest to achieve a minimalist lifestyle, a few months ago I ditched Spotify et al in favour of good old-fashioned linear broadcasting, via a cheap FM radio sat on the kitchen counter. This has worked mostly fine, but as a transhemispherical immigrant I found myself missing UK shows and finding my niche interests poorly catered for by the Aotearoan airwaves.

So I made a radio station from a Raspberry Pi Zero and a cheap FM transmitter. It pulls UK podcasts and hourly news bulletins from RSS feeds, mixes them with my own music library, throws in some bespoke jingles and oddities, and plays them all on a 24/7 self-regenerating loop. It all works surprisingly well, and reaches both the kitchen radio and my bedroom alarm clock!

I’m new to both Linux and Raspberry Pi so I’ve probably developed some hacky ways of making things work. Built using bash as I don’t know anything else. AI helped too, but tried to keep that to a minimum as was trying to learn stuff and it felt a bit like cheating.

I’m interested in other ways of modernising old tech I could try. Maybe a bespoke TV channel?

EDIT: A couple of people asked, so here’s github if you’re interested: https://github.com/trwmato/pi-fm-kitchen-radio

Lmk if you actually use it!