TinyRadio

A simple software-defined radio (SDR) receiver with a terminal UI, built in Zig.

What it does

TinyRadio turns your RTL-SDR dongle into an AM/FM radio with a text-based interface. It's not pretty, it's not optimal, its probably not even acturate, but it makes music come out of the air.

Requirements

These are included in the devbox shell

• Zig (latest version)
• RTL-SDR dongle and drivers (librtlsdr)
• PulseAudio (Linux)

Running TinyRadio

With Devbox

devbox run run

With Zig

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast run

Controls

• ↑/↓ - Tune frequency
• B - Switch AM/FM bands
• M - Mute/unmute
• -/+ or ←/→ - Volume down/up
• 1-6 - Load presets
• Q or Ctrl+C - Quit

Dependencies

This project is powered by the excellent zigradio library by vsergeev, which does all the heavy SDR lifting. Massive credit to that project for making software-defined radio flow graphs in Zig!

License

MIT License - see the code, hack it, break it, fix it, share it.

Note

This is a quick-and-dirty radio app. If you're new to Zig, this might be a fun project to explore, but don't expect production quality. It's more of a "look, SDR works in Zig!" proof of concept.