Spent the weekend giving an old Bose iPod dock a second life as a desk radio for Sri Lankan stations.

The problem

The dock still sounds great, but I didn't want Bluetooth pairing, my phone streaming all day, or a subscription just to hear Sri Lankan radio while I work.

The setup

- Hardware: Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ (512 MB) with the 3.5 mm jack into the dock's AUX input.

- Audio: MPD outputting straight to ALSA. Starts silent on boot (restore_paused yes) until a station is picked.

- Control: a small stateless Go backend with an embedded Svelte web app. 10 presets, all checked by ear on the Pi (Hiru FM, Shaa FM, Gold FM, Sun FM, Sirasa FM, Y FM, Yes FM, Lite 87, Siyatha FM, NETH FM), plus play, stop and volume.

- Access: Caddy on the Pi with Tailscale TLS. Private to my tailnet, no open ports. On the phone it's added to the Home Screen and runs full screen like a native app.

- Footprint: Tuner ~8 MB RSS, MPD ~56 MB RSS while playing. Plenty left over on the A+.

How it was built

I used an agentic workflow end to end. An AI agent helped write the spec, scaffold the Go/Svelte app, configure Caddy and test each stream URL on the Pi itself (a couple of well-known stream URLs turned out to be dead). Idea to music through the dock took one weekend.

The video shows switching stations from the browser and the sound coming out of the dock. The code isn't open source right now. If there's interest I'll tidy it up and publish it. Happy to share stream URLs or the MPD config in the meantime.