The Functionalist design philosophy that Dieter Rams brought to Braun from the 50s to the 90s still inspires the look of a few devices, including Apple’s iPod, Teenage Engineer’s synthesizers and recorders – and [2dom]’s IR7 streaming radio.
The streaming radio was inspired by Braun’s portable radios, particularly the SK2, TP1, and the T3 pocket radio. [2dom] started with the T3’s circular pattern of holes and experimented with several variations, finally settling on a cylindrical shape with a central display; a prototype with a low-power monochrome rectangular display was eventually rejected in favor of a circular LCD. The housing consists of four 3D-printed components: an upper and lower shell, a resonator for the speaker, and a knob for a rotary encoder.
Electronics-wise, an ESP32 handles the computing requirements, while the LCD and rotary encoder provide a user interface. For audio, it uses a VS1053 MP3 decoder, PAM8403 amplifier, and a wideband speaker, with an audio isolation transformer to clean up the audio. To reduce power consumption, a MOSFET cuts power to the peripheral components whenever the device is in sleep mode. The full design is available on GitHub.
The end result of this effort is a quite authentic-looking 21st-century adaptation of Rams’s original designs. If you’re interested in more Braun designs, check out this replica of one of their desk fans. We’ve also seen a restoration of one of Braun’s larger radios, the TS2.
