Abstract

The Silicon Instruments Si4732-A10 is a radio receiver integrated circuit (IC) used in many commercial portable radios. It comes in a 16-pin small-outline integrated circuit (SOIC) package and, using several onboard analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, it can be controlled by an Arduino through the Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) serial communications protocol. The software for controlling the IC hardware is implemented within the open-source Si4735 Arduino library, which I utilize in this project.

The radio features five push buttons for volume control, bandwidth filter size selection, changing the tuning step-size, and changing the band of interest (FM/AM/Shortwave bands). In addition, a rotary encoder with an efficient debouncing routine allows for precise control over the receiver frequency.