I'm collaborating with a team of local makers to make a good sized space ship for kids to play in, and we'd like to add a little bit of ambient sound by streaming SomaFM's Mission Control (SomaFM: Mission Control: Celebrating NASA and Space Explorers everywhere. Commercial-free, Listener-supported Radio) station in some high power speakers. However, we are building everything from scratch, and need to come up with a solution here that streams internet radio (over Wifi) cheaply.
We've thought about Mac Minis and netbooks, but those can cost anywhere from $200 and up. Does anyone have any simpler solutions to bring internet radio to an exhibition space on the cheap?
Interesting, I'll look into those. The WiFi radios I have seen so far have all vaguely alluded to some ability to choose from thousands of internet radio stations, but it doesn't say how. Since I'm looking for one exact, obscure radio station, I'm a little wary of devices that don't let me punch in a custom URL and be sure that it supports the codecs and whatnot.
Like I said, I'm thinking of a device like a Mac Mini or a netbook, or evena Chumby hacker board w/ ethernet. Just kind of curious what other solutions might be out there.
@KE7GKP - you can buy older Mac Minis for about $200-300. Besides, running tons of wire is useless if there's no signal!
@robtillaart - are you able to supply custom URLs or streams to such a device, or are you limited by what they offer in their own directory of stations?
The device has a webinterface and you can add URL's to the favorites , furthermore you can connect an USBstick with MP3s, it recognizes some media servers too