Is This The Smallest Internet Radio?

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Internet radios have been a thing in some form for the last quarter century, and the advent of cheap networked microcontrollers has made them easier than ever to build. But just how small can one be made? [Milen] has made one that’s about as small as we’ve seen, and put it up on Instructables.The hardware recipe is straightforward enough; take a microcontroller, connect it to the internet, and have your internet radio software squirt its output to a DAC. In this case the microcontroller is an ESP32-C£ on a very small dev board, and clipped to that is a custom PCB with a PCM5102A I2S DAC and an amplifier. The whole thing is tiny, small enough in fact that the two connectors are significant in size compared to it.Whether or not it’s a practical device for listening remains to be seen, but it’s certainly tiny. But the question is, could it be made smaller? Perhaps eschewing the connectors would be an easy win, and in return for a loss in quality the ESP has a built-in DAC that’s not intended for audio but can be used. If you have any bright ideas, we’d be interested to hear them.We’ve seen plenty of internet radios over the years, and for some reason this cassette-shaped one appeals to us.