Streaming with the $9 Next Thing Co CHIP computer

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DC31

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With some slight modifications the Darkice/Darksnow streaming setup for the Raspberry Pi3 also works on the CHIP computer from the Next Thing Company. (getchip.com) These single board computers have only recently begun mass production and they are promising two week delivery from Hong Kong. In the past, people have waited up to a year for delivery.

Of course, $9 is too good to be true, you will need a power supply, probably a usb sound card, a couple cables and probably around $7 shipping. But you should be good to go for around $30. Get the $2 plastic case as it protects the components on the back side of the card.

The attached .txt document details the steps to set it up.

I took the plunge and made the board modifications to enable the on-board sound input. it was actually fairly easy and eliminates the usb sound card and the usb hub if you needed one. Set it up to run headless and it is quite a compact little streamer.
 
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krokus

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I see the configuration is for a mono source, can this system handle a stereo feed? (In case you want to send out different radio channels/talkgroups on the different audio channels?

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DC31

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I see the configuration is for a mono source, can this system handle a stereo feed? (In case you want to send out different radio channels/talkgroups on the different audio channels?

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I haven't ever attepmted a stereo feed so i can't really speak to this. However, the darksnow configuration has a dropdown box to choose mono or stereo...
 

whiskey7g

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I am going to buy one of these Next Thing computers and see if it can run an RTL SDR receiver and stream it. I have other project boards that work but not for this cheap!
 

eddie555

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With some slight modifications the Darkice/Darksnow streaming setup for the Raspberry Pi3 also works on the CHIP computer from the Next Thing Company. (getchip.com) These single board computers have only recently begun mass production and they are promising two week delivery from Hong Kong. In the past, people have waited up to a year for delivery.

Of course, $9 is too good to be true, you will need a power supply, probably a usb sound card, a couple cables and probably around $7 shipping. But you should be good to go for around $30. Get the $2 plastic case as it protects the components on the back side of the card.

The attached .txt document details the steps to set it up.

I took the plunge and made the board modifications to enable the on-board sound input. it was actually fairly easy and eliminates the usb sound card and the usb hub if you needed one. Set it up to run headless and it is quite a compact little streamer.

Question from a newboob: I have configured my Ubuntu machine to work as a trunk tracking receiver, I would like to stream audio to my home LAN via Ethernet, can I use this device and what else to do this?
.
 

whiskey7g

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Question from a newboob: I have configured my Ubuntu machine to work as a trunk tracking receiver, I would like to stream audio to my home LAN via Ethernet, can I use this device and what else to do this?
.

Why not make your Ubuntu machine that is doing the trunk tracking do the streaming? If the computer is capable of doing trunk tracking it can definitely also stream the audio somewhere.

Instead of outputting the sound to a sound card you can have it pipe to a program that streams it.
 

DC31

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Why not make your Ubuntu machine that is doing the trunk tracking do the streaming? If the computer is capable of doing trunk tracking it can definitely also stream the audio somewhere.

Instead of outputting the sound to a sound card you can have it pipe to a program that streams it.

W7oog has said it much more eloquently than I could.

Try installing darkice on your ubuntu machine. Pipe the audio from your trunk tracker into darkice for streaming.

Install icecast2 on the Ubuntu machine. Use darkice to stream to icecast2 which will then serve up the audio stream so that you can listen to it from any device on your local network.

I think that apt-get install darkice will get you what you need. The below document outlines the basic procedure but i think the installation instructions may be dated.

https://stmllr.net/blog/live-mp3-streaming-from-audio-in-with-darkice-and-icecast2-on-raspberry-pi/

Will have to leave it up to you to figure out how to pipe the output into darkice.
 

Dygear

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Double confirm. After about an hour I think this time ... With this command ... Don't use a C.H.I.P. It can't handle SDR.

I thought I was being a little hard on the C.H.I.P. but even after moving over to a 2.5A power supply, it still fails within an hour. Last time it failed after 25 minutes. I'm going to get 1 more just to make sure that I didn't get a bad board, but they are currently out of stock. Has anyone got this working successfully?
 
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