What is it?

This is a wifi speaker that is fully independent and has no microphone so it does NOT spy on you and randomly start offering you specially branded toilet paper because you happened to mention in the kitchen the other day that you were out of toilet paper or gives you ads for internet dating sites because it could hear you crying about a breakup. None of that. Just a cool speaker that you completely control with buttons and a local web server interface that works directly off your wifi router / LAN at 192.168.0.100 or whatever it gets assigned. But you don't even NEED the web interface since once you set up the presets in a matter of minutes, you just need to turn it on and tune away. The local webpage offers a map of the world and about 6000 cities and towns which you can choose from for both over-the-air FM and AM and DAB stations as well as web-only stations. There are also built in lists of podcasts, and there is a settings page to add in up to 8 custom links that it might not have in its memory. It has any station offering their stream in MP3 format which is about half of them around the world and most podcasts. Many of them are extremely high quality 320 kbps which is as high a sound quality as it gets in that format (with proper compression is undetectable difference from CD quality stereo sound). You can test this from the 1/8 inch stereo jack output which overrides the built-in left and right speakers.

Why did you make it?

I made this speaker because everything else seemed too expensive and I wanted something with some basic buttons for station up/down and something simple like 8 presets that could be easily configured with a local web interface. It gets all the independent podcasts, which is a must since for new DJ music I wanted the Tiesto weekly station/podcast and Steve Aoki's station, Nora En Pure, Eelkie Kleijn, Alison Wonderland, etc etc all the big DJs built right in with their latest podcasts - or maybe you just want to use it to get some weird niche station that plays 1980's new wave (there are plenty of those just use the search feature built right in) or all cinema soundtracks by Ennio Morricone all day long (yes there is a station from Poland that does just that). You would ask - why not just use your phone ? NO! I wanted a separate device so I didnt have a bright phone screen in front of me when I just want to explore the sounds of the world with simple button clicks.

What makes it special?

This is an entirely INDEPENDENT music stream receiver with a 16 bit sound quality stereo speaker output PLUS external 1/8 inch stereo jack so you can hook it up to the auxiliary port of your stereo or a bigger speaker. If I can sell enough of these I will give away the source code of this one as I work on a V2. This one works on an ESP32C3 which is not normally supposed to work with high speed streams but after 2 solid years of tweaking and getting rid of memory fragmentation problems and optimizing the ---- out of everything it works pretty smoothly especially on home based WiFi using the approximately 200kB of RAM that is left over.

You can see the RAM usage in real time and the TCP IP stats for the whole duration and a special packet monitor for the most recent 30 seconds that I implemented to see when networks are lossy and when they are pretty solid (Image of one of the control panel areas attached). Blocks of 4096 bytes are counted every half a second. For faster MP3 streams like 320 kbps this shows up as a higher number than slower streams like 128 kbps.