Upcycling a 1960s clock with Raspberry Pi

Alan Boris has re-imagined an old analog clock radio from the 1960s using a Raspberry Pi 4B.

I saw this tired, dirty, unattractive 1960s radio in a thrift store and I just had to buy it to see if it could be modernized into something interesting.

I like to retrofit old electronics with modern components and this clock radio presented a real challenge! Basically nothing on the inside was salvageable.

An Adafruit 3.5 inch LCD HAT attached to a Raspberry Pi 4 fit nicely in place of the old clock. To easily add FM radio functionality, an RDA5807 module was added. It’s an entire FM radio with RDS on a tiny chip that can be controlled via I2C which is connected to the Pi. A MAX4544 analog switch module allows the audio to be switched between the Pi’s audio out and the FM module audio out. A Pi GPIO controls the switch, and its output feeds a TPA2016 audio amplifier.

I wanted to show a lot of active content on the screen but I did not want to code an entire user interface, so I decided to just display the output of a web browser. My Python code establishes a WebSocket connection to an onboard web server, allowing the button presses detected by the GPIO pins to manipulate JavaScript code in the browser.

See the video below and check out all the details in the post on hackster.io.