[Trwmato] wanted to spend more time listening to a normal radio to cut back on phone use. But the programming wasn’t quite right so, of course, the solution was to spin up a custom radio station!
The station in question uses a Pi Zero to poll podcasts and news from RSS feeds and automatically mixes them with local content and sends it out via Bluetooth. An FM transmitter allows it to still work on the FM radio, too. Grabbing podcasts isn’t very difficult, thanks to podget. The real logic is in how long to retain things and creating a playlist that both prioritizes fresh content while not repeating things too often. Did we forget to mention the whole thing is a collection of shell scripts?
We could see this as the start of a cool project to have a “radio station” for a school, organization, or company. It is easy to understand and modify.
We often argue that the much-maligned bash script is sometimes the right tool for the job. You can even do things like critical sections in them.