[Upcycle it Design Challenge] Embedded Web SDR client on Analog Radio Receiver #9: Problem with Browser

How to easily decode the WEB SDR transmission. Help needed!

Having returned back to my home city Athens, and fighting my jet lag, I set upon testing all the components for the challenge, just to make sure that they have survived the long trip.

Unfortunately for some reason that I have not discovered yet, my Edison module that I had so carefully hand carried and undergone flight inspections, would not boot or SSH no matter what I tried.  I used the USB cable through the Arduino IDE but again nothing. Edison’s disk space would not show on my computer. I then tried the “console” mode, but again nothing.

The blue LED on the Sparkfun base block would light up upon powering the module with 5 volts, but that was it. I increased the input  voltage to the module up to 8,5 volts, but still nothing.

Fearing the worse, I decided not to waste any further time, so I disassembled the module and decided to try using the second Edison board that I had plugged on the Edison Arduino board with different settings.

How thoughtful of the sponsors and organizers to provide us with a second Edison core board!

It helped fighting Mr. Murphy. Upon swapping the Edisons, I got terminal access to it, changed my wifi settings and was able to SSH, using my previous settings.

Well, that was something. I installed the OLED library and fired my test javascript to make sure that  the display had not gone. I was lucky that everything worked as it should, but now I had to install quite a number of node.js utilities that I was using for my project, as well as my development directory. I had   two backups with me and one on the Cloud!

This morning I was eventually back to where I was when I left Seattle, but some of my safety backup time had been gone.

I rescheduled my next steps and decided to increase my working hours, hoping that Murphy’s ghost would go away.

I then decided that if I could install and use a terminal text-only web browser under Yocto, it could help me shorten my development time.

I borrowed a Linux laptop with a stable Ubuntu version to make testing things easier, as Win10 home was not to my expectations.

I installed Lynx browser (http://lynx.browser.org/lynx2.8.8/index.html) in order to continue and got text web browsing quite easily.

But when I tried my test browsing “command”: http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/?tune=198am that would put me directly to BBC4 listening, I got the message that my browser did not support HTML5 WebAudio. So practically speaking, although I could get the text image of the site, there was no sound streaming in.

Then I installed the Chromium-browser for linux on the laptop and I am now trying to make it run without any X window.

As it fully supports HTML5 WebAudio, I think it would help.

I tried it on the laptop from command line and it brought the expected result. But I need to make it work without displaying any graphics and then port it to Edison.

Any ideas or recommendation from people with experience on customizing Chromium would be appreciated at this point.

Meanwhile, I SSH opkg update and now I am doing an opkg upgrade, just to make sure that my new installation will be fine.

That is all for the time being, while I am trying to solve the Browser issue.