If your looking for the Indie 103.1 iPhone app it’s been pulled from the app store until Entravision releases their official app. In the meantime, you can still pick up the stream on your iPhone with FStream, a nice free streaming radio app from Julien-Pierre Avérous.
You’ll have to configure FStream with the following URL:
http://provisioning.streamtheworld.com/pls/KDLDFM.pls
Later today I’ll be removing my Indie 103.1 iPhone app from the iTunes store. Entravision (the parent company of Indie) will soon be releasing their own official Indie iPhone app. I’m just a fan of the station and don’t want to get in the way of company business. I think it’s great that they’ll soon have their own app, whatever keeps the station going is a good thing in my opinion. The new app will be free from what I understand, but I haven’t seen it yet.
Download stats for the three weeks my app was available (2/2/09 – 2/22/09):
US downloads: 5,140
Non-US downloads: 1,802
Total worldwide downloads: 6,942
Thanks to the people at Indie and everyone who downloaded my app. It’s been fun!
UPDATE: app is no longer available.
A new version of the Indie 103.1 iPhone app has been published to the iTunes App Store. This update adds artist and title information from the mp3 stream. If you’ve already installed version 1.0 you’ll get an update notice on your phone, or you can update to the new version in iTunes.
NOTE: If you don’t see it yet it could take a bit for your iTunes to pick it up. I just got the update from the App Store on my phone.
Indie 103.1 App Version 1.1
Big thanks to everyone on Twitter who has helped get the word out. We’ve been climbing up the Top Fee apps list in the music category on iTunes. Let’s push it to the top!
UPDATE: app is no longer available.
Apple finally got my developer account in order so my Indie 103.1 iPhone App is now available in iTunes! The version in the App Store does not show the artist and song information, but I’ve already got that part working. I’ll send Apple an update and it should show up in iTunes in a few days. You can install version 1.0 now and you’ll get an update notice for the new version when it’s available.
UPDATE: app is no longer available.
My new iPhone application has been approved by Apple, but I’m waiting for them to complete the “contracts” that need to be in place before it gets in the App Store. I was waiting to publish this blog post until the app was published, but I decided to put this out here and make the app available to anyone who wants to install it manually though iTunes. Send me your iPhone Identifier and I can email you the application to install in iTunes. Send your identifier to my gmail address (mjablonski). Note: I’ll probably send out a newer build than what has been approved by Apple. I added artist & song title information in the past couple days… so this preview should be considered beta software.
Indie 103.1 iPhone Application
Here is the official app description:
Indie 103.1 was a California radio station serving Los Angeles and Orange County. The station has been taken off the airwaves, but a live stream is still available on the Internet. This application plays the Indie 103.1 stream on your iPhone/iPod Touch.
The application is compatible with all iPhone/iPod Touch devices. It works best using a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. The Indie stream pushes too much data for Edge data connections.
The Indie 103.1 app is available will be available for free in the App Store.
It’s also open source. You can download the source code and even contribute to the project if you want. The project homepage is hosted by Google Code.
There are a lot of features that could be added. My first goal was to get something working so I could listen to the stream without being next to a computer.
I saw Ed’s blog post earlier this year where he had the great idea of converting an NES controller to work over USB and stuffing a flash drive inside to hold an emulator and some roms. Ed used a USB keyboard controller to “talk” to the computer. When you push Up, Down, A, or B on the NES controller it would send keyboard letter presses to the computer, and the emulator would map those keys to the appropriate NES buttons. I thought that was cool, but I looked around on the Internet and saw some other projects that used a microcontroller to implement a true joystick interface that would be recognized by any computer (PC and Mac), and without any special drivers. I decided to build the adapter on Raphaël Assénat’s site and like Ed, include a flash drive in the controller case.
Here’s a quick rundown of what I did to build it:
First step: Buy Nintendo controllers
NES Controllers from eBay.
I found some controllers on eBay. Two were in fair condition, two were a little beat up.
Next: Open it up
Inside the controller.
Not much inside the controller. We’ll keep everything except the original cord. Initially I cut the cord off right around where it bends before it goes outside the housing. Later on I cut down each wire to keep things a little neater. For now keep the cord as it is, we can keep some length to help testing after the adapter is built.
Next: Build the NES to USB adapter
Breadboard layout.
I followed the instructions at raphnet.net and used his code to program the chip. I already had an SP12 programmer from a previous project, so I figured I could just use it again on this one. Probably one of the hardest parts of this project was programming this thing. I don’t mean writing the code, that’s already been done by someone else, I mean flashing the code to the Atmeg8 microcontroller. I rigged up my old programmer and got it to work, but I didn’t realize that I needed the other pieces (crystal, diodes, capacitors, etc) hooked up to the thing before I could flash it properly. Once I had that figured out the rest was just some soldering and getting everything to fit in the controller case.
Programming the microcontroller.
I had to dust off my Windows XP machine to find a parallel port that I could use with my old programmer! I used avrdude from WinAVR to do the flashing.
Next: Test it out!
First test.
I wired the controller and a USB cable into the breadboard. You can see the USB cable is going into my laptop. At this point if you’ve built and flashed the adapter correctly your computer should register a USB device, and in Windows it should show up under the Game Controllers section in the Control Panel. On the Mac you can see the USB device in the System Profiler (try to hit refresh if you don’t see it).
Another test.
Yeah, it’s working. 
Next: Clean the controller
Cleaning the controller parts.
Next: Cram everything into the controller
Because this controller is actually two USB devices (joystick and flash drive) you need to include a USB hub inside the controller. I cut off two of the nubs on the bottom piece of the controller to allow the USB hub and the adapter to fit. You can figure out which ones to remove when you try to put the bottom piece back on.
A view of all the components.
What a mess.
Another view of all the components.
The blue piece at the bottom is a 1 GB flash drive (thank you Sun Microsystems). The green square in the upper right is a 4 port USB hub (cut in half, only two ports are left). The NES to USB adapter is the mess with all the wires. The thing hanging off on the right side is the crystal for the micocontroller. It was kind of big so I ended up putting it under the NES board along with the flash drive. You can see that in the previous picture.
Next: Close it up and play
The finished controller.
This project was fun. The controller feels great and works on my Mac and PC(s). I actually made two controllers. One I gave away to a friend, the other I’m keeping for myself. If I was to do this again I would absolutely buy the pre-made circuit board from raphnet.net. Getting the thing to flash and then trying to make all those wires and resistors fit was a bit of a pain. $20 or whatever he wants is a fair price, and worth every penny.
I found some nice NES icons at IconArchive. Drop an autorun.inf file on the flash drive so you’ll get an icon and default action to run your emulator. You can use one of the bigger icons to change the drive icon on a Mac.
I bought a Mac Mini so I could write an iPhone application. This was my first Mac, and I was always a Non-Mac guy. I didn’t hate the Mac, but I didn’t care much about them either. I guess I knew OS X was built on Unix, but it was not until I strarted up the Terminal app and found myself at a bash shell that I really got it. This is my new desktop computer, but my laptop still runs Windows.
The Mac Mini
I’ve been a Microsoft .NET developer for a while now, so building something for the iPhone outside of Visual Studio was going to be fun. The end result is OOFy. It’s a dead simple iPhone app that lets you set your Exchange Server Out of Office message. It works on both Exchange Server 2003 and 2007. I’ve tested it out on a number of different server configurations, but it’s not guaranteed to work on any non-standard installations. I’ve done contract work at Microsoft and it works on their setup, so that’s good enough for me.
Buy OOFy
OOFy is only $0.99 and it’s available in the Business Category of the App Store.
OOFy Main Screen
More information is available on the OOFy homepage.
Listen to thousands of radio stations on your iPhone!
