Ottercast Firmware is built using buildroot.
It’s running a mainline Linux kernel, with GNU userland, systemd, PulseAudio and Avahi.
Download ready-made images
Current firmware binaries can be found on GitHub at:
Ottercast/buildroot-ottercast-audio
Firmware images are automatically built for each commit via GitHub Actions.
Flashing the image
The procedure is identical to a Raspberry Pi. Make sure to unzip (.gz/gzip) the firmware before writing it to a card.
Firmware binaries are disk images, containing partitions and can be written directly to an SD card or eMMC flash.
Do NOT copy the file onto a SD card as a file.
It needs to be written as a disk image using a tool like Etcher, Win32 Disk Imager or dd.
Initial configuration
After flashing, you can mount the FAT32 partition and edit the config.sh and (optional) ssh_authorized_keys.
Configure your WiFi credentials, SSH public keys and a name for the device.
Building your own image
Building your own image can be done on a regular x86_64 machine running Linux.
Make sure to fulfill the buildroot dependencies:
| Distribution | Command |
|---|---|
| Arch/Manjaro | pacman -S base-devel git wget perl unzip rsync ncurses |
| Debian/Ubuntu/Mint | apt install build-essential git wget unzip rsync libncurses-dev |
These dependency lists are untested, please report if something is missing!
mkdir ottercast
cd ottercast
git clone https://github.com/Ottercast/buildroot-ottercast-audio.git
wget https://buildroot.org/downloads/buildroot-2021.02.1.tar.gz
tar xfv buildroot-2021.02.1.tar.gz
cd buildroot-2021.02.1/
make BR2_EXTERNAL=../buildroot-ottercast-audio/buildroot/ ottercast_s3_defconfig
This will generate a config file in the buildroot folder.
(optional) Use make menuconfig to change buildroot settings (enable/disable packages, compile settings, etc.).
(optional) Use make linux-menuconfig to change kernel parameters.
Compile the firmware using make -j$(nproc).
This will take ~60min on a very fast machine with stable internet connection.
First compilation will download, compile and assemble a full Linux installation from scratch.
This can take up to several hours. Be patient! Changes will build much faster.
The resulting disk image will be located at buildroot-(version)/output/images/sdcard.img.
The external tree can be found at: https://github.com/Ottercast/buildroot-ottercast-audio.
Webinterface
The webinterface is written in PHP and running as a CGI script.
uhttpd is used as a webserver and serves /var/www on Port 80 via HTTP.
Frontend is using Bootstrap and jQuery.