Radiovy 1.0.1

Introduction

This project is a sub project of my ‘homekeepi’ project, in which I’m planning to support several functions to help my family to do house keeping works, also to provide a few entertainment things.

Playing Internet radio stations is one of them. It is not a big deal, once we have a URL to play. But how to collect URLs and select one to play is not so trivial. Basically the following steps must be done.

1. go to a public Internet radio station site

2. download pages which include radio stations URL

3. for playlist URL, go to the playlist site and download it

4. from the playlist get a streaming URL

5. repeat 2 to 4, and organize the URLs in a database

6. Let users select one of the URLs

7. Play/Stop the selected URL

I’ve found ‘https://www.internet-radio.com/’ is the best place to collect URLs, and supported the above functions by accessing that site.

getradiourl.py

This program does ‘1’ to ‘5’ in the list above. ‘ZODB’ is used as the database to save URLs

gstplayer.py

This program does ‘7’ in the list above. gstreamer is used to play radio station streams.

radiovy.py

This program does ‘6’ in the list above. It runs on kivy, and is targeted to show GUI on 800x480 Raspberry Pi touch screen panel.

installation

If Kivy 1.10 is available, this package must be instllable and runnable. I’ve tested on ‘KivyPie Version 1.0’ and Mint Linux 18.2.

$ sudo pip install radiovy

The installation should be completed by this command.

configuration

In ‘hkbase’ directory under the installed directory, there is ‘config.cfg’ file, which includes all configurable values. Simple explanation is there and changing the configurations must be straight forward.

If you put ‘config.cfg’ in ‘~/.getradiourl’, which becomes a primary config file, and the above mentioned file becomes a secondary file.

How to use

Run ‘radiovy’ from a console. At the fist run, it downloads genres information automatically, so it takes a while to start up the first screen. Once the genres information is ready, it shows a top page of ‘radiovy’.

Hitting ‘genres’ button, shows a genre-list page. Each genre name is a button to go inside the genre.

Selecting a genre, a modal dialog box shows up and ask you if you want to update stations information. Because of the first run, there is not any stations information, it can’t show stations information page without downloading it.

Clicking on ‘Update Stations’, it changes the button color and freezes for a while. How log it is depends on which genre you selected. A big genre like ‘pop’ takes quite a long time.

There is another button on the modal dialogue box, which is ‘Update All’ button. Hitting this button downloads all stations information for all the genres. It takes a few hours, but if you had done it, you wouldn’t have to wait to select any genre on the screen.

Once the stations information is ready, the button color returns to the original color, and hitting ‘Done’ button, it returns to the genre-list page.

Now, it can go ahead to show stations list for the selected genre. It shows the next kind of station-list page.

The stations list is on a scroll window, with the default configuration, it shows up to 80 stations in a scroll window, and paginate into multiple pages when there are more stations.

Hitting one station, it starts playing the station. Hitting again, it stops playing.

There are ‘mark this genre’ button and ‘mark playing station’ button, hitting those buttons makes the selected genre or the playing station is put at earlier position in the list.