Russell Davies has been experimenting with background audio and asked us to build a few “sound boxes” to help out with that.

We built an embedded Linux system to automatically connect and stream audio from the Internet. The interface for the boards was deliberately simple, providing a switch to choose one of a number of channels, and a volume control.

For the housing, we tried both a completely new case and electronics, and also retrofitting it into an old 1970s radio (shown here during assembly).

Russell has written a bit about the boxes over on his blog.