I want to feed the FM radio signals to raspberry pi. Having a basic understanding of electronics, I figured out that a FM receiver and an ADC is required. Now I need help on how to proceed with the connections. Is there any kit or module which will help me?
-
Is there any particular purpose in feeding the FM radio signals into the Pi? – joan Feb 28 '15 at 20:12
-
2Your best bet is an I2C based receiver, then you can skip the separate ADC. – goldilocks Feb 28 '15 at 20:34
-
1@joan my Nexus phone doesn't have FM radio receiver and my favourite FM station doesn't streaming on Internet. – krthkj Mar 01 '15 at 04:18
-
1So you want to pipe FM radio through the Pi speakers. You don't want to perform signal analysis. So try a TEA5767 module or the much better RDA5807M based modules. – joan Mar 01 '15 at 08:00
-
1Yes, my first goal to to pipe FM through Pi speakers, then stream it over the internet. – krthkj Mar 01 '15 at 15:11
4 Answers
I have seen some tutorial where someone used an Phillips TEA 5767 FM Tuner to receive radio. with this breakout board. You should be successfull with that! It seems the TEA cost about $3~4$.
This blog gives a detailed description how you can convert your PI into an FM Tuner:
Here in this post where there is a discussion about the PI and the TEA.
I hope this helps you move forward to catch some great songs your favourite FM station.

- 17,307
- 6
- 65
- 104

- 852
- 8
- 19
-
@krthk_j let me know, if it works and maybe write a blog post somewhere. seems to be interesting! – Joe Platano Mar 01 '15 at 13:50
Forget about the DAC. You need an USB RTL-SDR dongle. They run from $10 - $30 on Amazon. FM radio is the one case where the antenna that they come with is good enough.
Install rtl_fm, and then pipe the output of rtl_fm into your Icecast source program.

- 51
- 1
- 2
I've not tried the approach summarized here, but the summary makes sense. This summary page contains a link that offers to sell you a PDF with all of the details for US$2.95. This is not an endorsement, and I have absolutely no connection with the sellers... so caveat emptor
and all of that. Potential positives with this are that you may be able to hold the seller accountable if his recipe turns out to be garbage (i.e. file a PayPal dispute). OTOH, I'm sure there are other guides that are available for free; the tradeoff may be that you'll need to invest a bit more of your time.
You'll need to buy a RTL-SDR dongle to execute this "recipe", and that could set you back US$27.95 if you buy the dongle from RTL-SDR.com (same disclaimer as above). The good news is that this dongle may be used in a variety of other projects beyond FM radio, and there's plenty of source code floating around that's free. Potential tradeoffs between using the RTL-SDR dongle vs. ADCs, FM tuner chips and the like may be how to get the audio into your speakers, integrated FM antenna, etc, etc.
This is just another answer/approach to building an FM radio using the Raspberry Pi. I don't claim that it's any better or worse than any of the other answers/approaches given here. Anyone contemplating this project should weigh up the options, and choose the one that suits them. Ultimately, any of them will work, so the best choice for you will depend upon how the tradeoffs suit you.

- 21,900
- 3
- 33
- 70
Just for completeness, here's a simple solution for software defined radio on the raspberry pi that connects by USB.
I have no connection to Adafruit, I just keep finding things there.

- 871
- 1
- 7
- 10