FM radio reception on neo/openmoko and some other questions

Doug Sutherland doug at proficio.ca
Mon Nov 12 06:12:20 CET 2007


Georg wrote:
 > no only in terms of speakerphone, also the navigational software (as far
> as there'll be one) may be connected through it.. There are a lot of
> possible ways to use that extension and I personally think that it's a
> very useful additional feature .

Speaking of navigation, this is interesting, Locosys makes something
called Traffic Message Channel (TMC) using the Silicon Labs
SI4701 FM tuner RDS feature to gather real-time traffic and
weather information. They use an 8051 microcontroller to read
the RDS data from SI4701 and convert it into NMEA sentence
format, which is of course, also a format used by GPS receivers.
So, if you have onboard GPS, and bolt-on FM tuner with RDS,
and some processing, you could do something similar. The NMEA
part presumably is just to make it somewhat standard, is useful
data on its own, but this is quite interesting.

http://www.locosystech.com/download/module/TMC-1513_datasheet_v1.1.pdf

I'm going to design just a very simple breakout board for the
SI4701 to start playing around with it, this RDS stuff is very
interesting. Later will make another board with SI4701 and
small microcontroller plus audio codec. Microcontroller
will read the RDS and also control/configure the FM tuner.
Analog audio output would work alone but could also input
into Neo or other application. Currently in the middle of
switching jobs and residence though, so it may be a short
while before I get any boards made.

  -- Doug





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