element14 launches global design competition to develop Internet Radio

To help design engineers to experiment on internet radio, element14 has announced its “BeagleBone Black Radio Challenge”, which has received early entries from Australia, Japan and India. In this Challenge for the creation of a fully-featured internet / digital radio, the BeagleBone Black has been bundled with a 4.3” LCD screen cape, compact USB Wi-Fi adapter with 4” antenna, Adafruit power adapter, Adafruit BBB case, and Adafruit Software Defined Radio Receiver USB Stick.

Designed to address the Open-Source Community and anyone interested in ARM Cortex-A8 based processor, it can connect with the Internet and run software such as Angstrom and Ubuntu.

Ravi Pagar, Regional Director – South Asia, element14 Asia-Pacific, said, “There are hundreds of interesting radio stations in Asia broadcasting from India, Malaysia and Vietnam among others, and through this challenge, participants will get to share with our 200,000 member-strong Community their progress in developing an easy-to-use internet radio. It would be quite exciting to be able to easily listen to music or news from any of the 44,000 radio stations in the world.”

Selected participants will start their reviews and blog on 17 February and complete by 28 March details of their project as they progress, including videos, diagrams and code samples.  

The most intriguing, engaging materials for a fully operational internet / digital radio will win a Grand Prize from Texas Instruments.