Noxon iRadio gateway

Push your own content onto Noxon iRadio devices: RSS feeds, text files and MediaTomb server structures.

This tool makes it possible to push own data into the menu entries "Internet Radio", "Podcasts" and "My Noxon" without relying on the official Terratec servers.

Contents

Features
Customizing the directory structure
Setup
About noxon-gateway
- Homepage
- License
- Author

Features

Customize the Noxon iRadio menus "Internet Radio", "Podcasts" and "My Noxon"
Show Mediatomb UPnP server content in "Internet Radio", so that you don't have to restart your iRadio because it does not find the UPnP server after a day of standby
Display text files and run shell scripts from the menu (home automation)
Podcast RSS feed support
Discoverable with your web browser
Transcoding of non-mp3 file types to .mp3 that iRadios can play
Single file mode for children that want to listen to a single story before sleeping
Paging results with ?startitems=1&enditems=10 GET parameters

RSS feed support

Simpy write a podcast's mp3 RSS feed URL into a .url file in the var/ directory structure, and your radio will show you a folder with all episodes. Enter an episode to play it.

The Noxon iRadios do only allow a single HTTP redirect when they access a URL to play, but many podcast feeds send you for tracking purposes through 3 or more redirects until you reach the final mp3 URL.

noxon-gateway resolves the redirections for the iRadio, so that this will not be a problem.

Creating an RSS feed

You have to know the URL to the podcast's mp3 RSS feed, e.g. http://cast.example.org/news.rss.

Create a file Cast News.url in var/podcasts/ and write the RSS URL into it. That's all.

When accessing the "Podcasts" menu from your noxon iRadio, you'll see a directory Cast News that contains all podcast episodes.

Single file mode

Your kid only wants to listen to this one single story before sleeping. You start it, set the 15 minute sleep timer and leave the room.

After 15 minutes the child comes out and complains that the radio switched off within the second story and it wants to hear it to the end.

To get around such issues, you can enable "single file directories" for certain folders.

Each folder with audio files within this configured paths have a special directory "Einzeln" (single), which have separate folders for each audio file. Each of this separate folders only have the single audio file in them.

When playing this file, the iRadio will stop playing after the one file is over.

Supported radios

This is the list of iRadios known to work with noxon-gateway:

Noxon iRadio (original white version)
Noxon iRadio cube

Others should work. If you know of unlisted radios that do work with this tool, please tell me.

Web browser support

You can discover the noxon-gateway contents with your web browser. Point your browser to the gateway's domain and start browsing:

This works because the XML files delivered by noxon-gateway contain the link to an XSLT file that converts the XML structure to HTML that browsers understand.

Works at least with Firefox 42 and Chromium 45.

Customizing the directory structure

The var/ directory contains three directories you can fill with your own content.

Menu item	`var/` Directory
Internet Radio	`internetradio`
Podcasts	`podcasts`
My Noxon	`mynoxon`

You can put folders and files into this directories.

The internetradio directory is hard-coded to display the contents of a MediaTomb UPnP server. You can remove the check in index.php#handleRequest() if you do not want this.

File types

Directory

A directory is browsable by your Noxon radio

.txt file

Text files are rendered as un-actionable lists, one list item per line.

Empty lines get removed, consecutive spaces get collapsed.

.url file

Podcast feed URL file.

Simply contains the URL to the podcast's MP3 RSS feed.

executable file

Script is shown as directory and gets executed when navigating into it. Output is shown as it is for .txt files.

I use it to control my house's heating system from the radio.

*.auto* (executable)

Script gets executed when browsing the folder. The output is integrated into the directory listing with the same rules as for .txt files.

You can use this to show the current time within the directory listing.

nocache

Disables menu caching.

File extensions get removed for display purposes.

Sorting

Files and directory are sorted alphabetically and get listed in this order.

You can prefix your files and directories with [0-9]+_, which lets you influence sorting and gets removed in the listings.

Consider the following files:

01_temp.auto.sh
02_warmer.sh
03_colder.sh

Would render as:

Temperature: 23°C
warmer
colder

(given that 01_temp.auto.sh outputs the temperature string)

Caching

When going back in the menu strucutre with the left arrow button, Noxon iRadios display a cached version of the menu.

If you do not want this - because a script modified values that are displayed in the parent menu, or because the script that displays the time should always be run - you may disable caching.

Caching is disabled when a file named nocache is found in the directory.

Setup

Hosts

The following hosts must point to your server and be handled by this tool:

radio567.vtuner.com
radio5672.vtuner.com
gatekeeper.my-noxon.net

Configure this in your router or the DNS server your iRadio devices use.

MediaTomb

To be able to browse a MediaTomb server, copy data/config.php.dist to data/config.php and fill it with mediatomb web interface credentials.

You also have to install the Services_Mediatomb library via PEAR:

$ pear channel-discover zustellzentrum.cweiske.de
$ pear install zz/services_mediatomb-alpha

Transcoding

If you have non-mp3 files in your audio collection, install ffmpeg on the noxon-gateway server. Transcoding will start automatically when the player accesses a file that is not in audio/mpeg format.