Thread: For Guino: USB Radio FM with RDS from Silabs

Originally Posted by Wickerswammie

It performs good when stationary (no pops/cracks in the audio at all). When I am moving I get infrequent pops in the audio that seem to be radio related (I don't hear them when listening to mp3s).

The external antenna was not as helpful as I had hoped, but it is better than not connecting it at all. I experiemented with the little wire, giving it random positions within my dash, all with no luck. If I taped it up the middle of my front windshield reception was perfect (did not try that moving), but I'm not going down that route. Using the bare wire in my dash without connecting it to the external antenna was wretched.

I soldered the wire to an adapter I found at Best Buy which connects to my stock antenna wire.

That sounds similar to my experience. I soldered on a motorola adapter to interface with my oem antenna. The results were OK at times but mostly unacceptable -- nothing close to an off-the-shelf car radio. I also tried bypassing the antenna input filter circuitry but that didn't seem to change things. I tried both polarizations of my oem antenna -- no difference. Finally, I tried it with my factory antenna amplifier on and off -- again no big difference.

I use the SiLabs radio in the house now, with my desktop PC. It works and sounds great in that environment.

Originally Posted by Wickerswammie

I'll see if I can gather the files you will need when I get off work. You will probably also need some .lib files.

I managed to download from Microsoft the full DDK and now I have the proper files installed in C:\WINDDK\3790.1830 ...
I inserted the Inc\wxp direcotory in the compiler path.

All the .cpp files are correctly compiled exept "FMRadioDevice.cpp" that cannot find the following declarations:

Compiling...
FMRadioDevice.cpp
C:\USBRadio\FMRadioDevice.cpp(1668) : error C2065: 'ABOVE_NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS' : undeclared identifier
C:\USBRadio\FMRadioDevice.cpp(1673) : error C2065: 'CreateTimerQueueTimer' : undeclared identifier
C:\USBRadio\FMRadioDevice.cpp(1679) : error C2065: 'WT_EXECUTEINTIMERTHREAD' : undeclared identifier
C:\USBRadio\FMRadioDevice.cpp(1700) : error C2065: 'DeleteTimerQueueTimer' : undeclared identifier
Error executing cl.exe.

FMRadioDevice.obj - 4 error(s), 0 warning(s)

Any idea?

Originally Posted by Wickerswammie

It looks like you're missing some other stuff too.

I can't imagine that your development environment is working without it, but perhaps you need the platform SDK?

I found this on the documentation for CreateTimerQueueTimer.

To compile an application that uses this function, define _WIN32_WINNT as 0x0500 or later. For more information, see Using the SDK Headers.

Make sure you have the platform SDK (it should come with your compiler, but if your compiler is old you might need to get an updated version of the SDK).

My suggestion is to peruse the msdn site for more information.

OK. Once installed the SDK and corrected the VC directories everything works smooth. I recompiled the DLL just to make sure it was still OK and now I can do all my experiments ...

Thanks again for your support.

Originally Posted by Wickerswammie

Hi, thanks for sharing that! The source has been shared, it's in this thread somewhere.

Based on your investigation then the driver code just needs to pull those bits out of the stream. I can definitely look into this, but my device is in the dash of my truck right now, and I don't plan to install a development environment on my truck ;-) That would be a little too geek for even me.

Actually I'm adding a full controll of all RDS information available from the stream to the DLL with the intent to use the DLL from any VB6 program/RR-plugin.

To do so I'm adding a new series of functions starting with the name "VB_" that use the VB variables passing convention.

Stay tuned I'll post the new DLL (VC/VB source code and the .dll) in a couple of days.

Mine turned up today and I'm listening to the radio now ; I think I'll try and use the RDS information to see if I can either A) extend or B) create a new DLL with full RDS features.

Could take a while though as this is my first go at this RDS decoding.

I'll let you know how it goes