What good are lights synchronized to music if you can’t hear anything? Just some lights blinking randomly, which is fun and all, but not really. You could plug in some speakers if you really want to piss off your neighbors, or broadcast your music over FM and let your viewers tune into the station from their cars. I decided to choose the latter.
There’s some pretty expensive FM broadcasting equipment out there, but I only needed to hit a few hundred feet. I chose to go with the Belkin Tunecast II modification. It’s a pretty cheap little device, $30 or so, which is normally designed to plug into an iPod for playing music in your car. It runs on AAA batteries and has a little power saving thing which automatically turns on when music is played, then off if no music plays for 60 seconds. With a little modification, you can boost the signal to easily cover your street.
There’s a great walkthrough on Instructables, but in a nutshell, you’ll need to take off the battery cover and unscrew a single screw. This will allow you to pop off the shell and expose the circuit board. There’s one more screw you’ll need to remove, but then you’ll have full access to everything you need.
The antenna used by default is a blue wire soldered to the board and wrapped in the cable that connects to your iPod. All you need to do is desolder this blue wire, it even says ANT on the board where you do it, and solder on your own. I chose some medium gauge speaker wire around 4ft long, just happened to have some on hand. You could solder in an extendable antenna if you want, I didn’t need that for this application though.
To get the case back on, I had to dremel out a bit for where the new antenna wire would go, and applied some electrical tape over the power connectors just in case they rubbed with the antenna. Then it was as easy as screwing things back together and snapping the shell back on. I can easily get a signal a few houses down from my garage, more than enough range for me.