Has anyone used one of these AM/FM/SW/LW I2C radio receivers on an mbed project? Silicon labs makes several and they are available at Digikey and Sparkfun in surface mount. So far, it looks like I would have to get an SMT to DIP adapter and hook up a bunch of external RLCs. It seems like someone should make a breakout board for them?

http://www.silabs.com/Support%20Documents/TechnicalDocs/Si473x-B20.pdf is one example.

I did find a breakout board for one of the older FM only chips. I thought they might make an interesting student project.

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10227

Hi Jim. Did you get anywhere with this ? Where can you get the adapters? Also Software Defined Radio would be a great thing to use the mbed for.

I got one mounted on a Sparkfun SMT to DIP adapter board and some students tried it, but they did not make any real progress. They had it sending back an ack to I2C commands and could adjust the volume, but only got static. I suspect they did not hook up the external parts for the antenna correctly and probably never fully understood the I2C setup commands needed. Sparkfun had a hint in a forum post that they might be coming out with a breakout for it. Sparkfun has the adapter (it has some extra pins as I recall, but it does fit). http://www.sparkfun.com/products/500 might be the one, but double check it I am not in the lab today to check. The comments on the chip page http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10227 also list of couple of others. Don't know anything about the batchPCB one.

Sparkfun got one of the older FM only chips back on a breakout board in mid March as seen above http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10344 and the comment about the newer one with SW/FM/AM "soon to come" is there.

I kind of put it on the back burner waiting for the new soon to come breakout board.

ooooooooohhhh hahahaah cool:)

You know what would be cool a dab radio ic :)

Sparkfun just came out with this new SW/AM/FM radio breakout today!

New Sparkfun SW/LW/AM/FM radio breakout board

It is on a Shield format PCB with an I2C control interface.

"The Si4735 is the first digital CMOS AM/FM radio receiver IC that integrates the complete tuner function from antenna input to audio output. This feature-rich solution includes advanced seek algorithms, soft mute, auto-calibrated digital tuning, and FM stereo processing. The chip also incorporates a digital processor for the European Radio Data System (RDS) and the North American Radio Broadcast Data System (RBDS), including all required symbol decoding, block synchronization, error detection, and error correction functions. Basically it's an entire AM/FM, LW/SW radio in a single chip."

Could you transfer the audio in a digital format to the mbed 10 bit DAC

The SI4735 chip is also now available from Elektor magazine - see the link below.

http://www.elektor.com/products/kits-modules/kits/090740-71-sdradio-mit-atm18-(cc2-avr-projekt).1115057.lynkx

I am not interested in anything to do with delta sigma. I don't know tho if you take a delta sigma and then put it into a R2R Dac what happens?

Students have the new Sparkfun AM/FM/SW radio breakout working with mbed at

http://mbed.org/users/bwilson30/notebook/si4735-digital-amfm-radio-receiver/

The board is setup for SPI, but they have a hack for I2C

Sparkfun just came out with a SI4735 radio breakout board. Still needs a few external parts.

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10906