Ducky is an internet radio with a single purpose: to play BBC 6 Music in our kitchen. Plug USB-C power into Ducky’s foof and stereo flows from its poop hole. Ducky has only one control: The Hat. Twist Ducky’s hat for on/off and for volume control.

Tech: The guts are a simple circuit with ESP32S3 and a PCM5102 DAC module, add a switched potentiometer and a couple of sockets, and you’ve got the whole thing. The project made heavy use of the outstanding Arduino Audio Tools by Phil Shatzmann and ESP32 Audio i2s by schreibfaul1. I created some cool meme sunglasses for Ducky to wear, which I have uploaded to Printables.

In mid-2023, Ducky was silenced when the BBC intentionally screwed up their radio streams so that simple and older internet devices could no longer play their radio stations. After 2 years, the open-source community figured out how to play an M3U8 HLS stream on an ESP32 (thank you), and Ducky is finally working again.