Solar powered Audio Stream

Each year I partake in the Locusonus Dawn Chorus Day - here isthis years schedule - it is a wonderful project that switches between audio streams at sunrise for 24hrs and makes its way across the globe. Many people keep their streams live year round and you can listen here.

This year I wanted to make my stream more permanent and to move it further from the outdoor living area of our house so that there would be less human interference/conversation on the stream. To do that I needed to make it self contained - solar powered with a battery and a solar panel and a charge controller.

It took some time to work all this out and so I thought I would share the system I put together which seems to be working well.

The streaming box is aRaspberry Pi Model B+ with a Cirrus Logic Audio Card using the Locusonus Streambox Operating system with Darkice streamer. The Cirrus Logic Board is hard to get and has older drivers but they are still around and very reliable and there are new drivers being developed.

This setup is in a small HiFiBerry case and needs a WiFi dongle as it is not included on the board of the B+

The Raspberry Pi is powered by by a 5V DC connection provided by the solar charge controller, a Renogy Wanderer 10 Amp 12V/24V PWM controller. controller. The Renogy Wander can be set to almost any battery chemistry and can be networked or made available over Bluetooth. The 5V output is rated at 2Amps which is just enough to cope with peak draw from the PI, although the Pi seems to run around 0.2A when streaming.

The charge controller gets energy input from the solar panel and maintains the charge on the battery. The Solar panel I am using is a 50W flexible panel with a high efficiency rating. And the Battery is a 12V, 22AH RAION ActiveCare medical battery designed for wheelchairs and should easily provide the power required for this application.

I am streaming in mp3 format although ogg is available and better quality. The problem is that many browsers do not handle the ogg format.

You can listen directly here

or by going to theLocusonus world open microphone map and zooming into the Temp Arizona microphone.

Expect a range of birds: Mockingbirds, woodpeckers, doves, towhees, vireos, sparrows, warblers, finches, hummingbirds and the occasional Rosy Faced Lovebird and more; plus traffic, airplanes, occasional dogs, very occasional rain and general urban sounds. In the depths of the night, expect to hear the rattle of the pool pump

everything tucked away on a small shelf