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We're about to embark upon implementing a device running Linux that (among other things) will be attached to a software defined FM/AM radio that can also receive RDS data describing playlists and other such stuff. It's a relatively stupid device that mostly contains a DSP or two that act as tuners and otherwise does very little processing of the signal.
I was thinking that kernel drivers for the device and then a userland hardware abstraction layer that provided a standardized interface and abstracted away the details of exactly when the RDS data was received and dealt with error handling and all the other messy stuff. Is there already a userland layer like this? It would be nice to either avoid making it at all, or make our stuff plug-compatible with something that already exists so we could use other projects for the radio UI if we wanted.
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It sounds like you are creating a new hardware radio device? You'll probably need to build a driver for this device. Some help getting started can be found here, here, and here. If your device is not new, it may already have a driver in the Video4Linux2 project.
It looks like there are some RDS related projects based on the saa6588 kernel module currently.
According to this page, these cards are currently have a SAA6588 chipset:
I'd recommend to check out some of the projects related to Video4Linux2 (v4l2), there is an RDS decoding library. This library runs in userspace, so the RDS decoding work can be done there for you:
According to V4L2 specifications, raw data from RDS decoders is read from the radio device. Data consists of blocks where each block is 3 bytes long. All decoding has to be done in user space.
Here is a complete API reference for Video4Linux2. Here is an article series to get acquainted with it.
The particular section for the RDS API is here. This page provides information about how to get an update about whether RDS data is available:
Whether an RDS signal is present can be detected by looking at the rxsubchans field of struct v4l2_tuner: the V4L2_TUNER_SUB_RDS will be set if RDS data was detected.
Although it's not an official API I found one last small project that might be worth looking into:
Here are some more radio related projects worth looking into.
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