developing an idea

With all the demolition at school at the moment it has been a busy time recovering different items that we can use to develop and enhance life at school. Some of these items have been used in the past to provide some enhancements and need to be reinvigorated. We have new students starting every year so some of the ideas may seem new to them, yet the year 13 students may have encountered this before.

Items recovered:
Amp,
two outdoor speakers,
speaker wire

Now this may seem weird, but our school has a special asset, we have a working radio station. Something I would have liked at my previous school. What a way to get students interested in radio broadcasting or sound technician or even an interest in music.

Now with this, the radio station is a mess after the painters were in earlier this year repairing earthquake related issues. Now, if the radio station needs some work in getting up and going again, how long and do we wait. Or do we look at other alternatives. How could be deliver music to the school. Using the gear and the students itouches, we could hooked up a 3.5mm cord and link it in, however do I want students to be able to do this, will it cause issues. However, we could use a fm radio transmitter hooked up to a itouch and tune the radio in, but this could mean multiple devices trying to play to the same frequency as there is only a limited amount on offer with these devices.

Using airplay could be an answer. But it would require a apple airport extreme to be able to connect up.
First question is, could you hooked up a device to the amp without a ethernet connection. This has taken some time and also trying to source a device.

Open trademe and start bidding.

Done, wait till delivery.

Now test and try out at home, plug in, why is it flashing amber, reset configuration to be able to access this device as it was setup for someones else network.

Create my own network and attach...
Done, now Airport utility is accessing device, why it is showing 3 errors, ok, no internet connection, no DNS and no IP Address - ignore all three errors.

Light goes Green :)

Hook in a old pair of headphone, find wifi network on iphone, and now find music and push through airplay. Add a password on airplay connections to stop other students from pushing there music to it.

Now to find out the range and try out at school.

Should be an interesting monday at school lunchtime.

Now there is another question, can I push the music from that is going through into a stream so that students can connect to the school wifi and listen through there headphones, as the itouch and iphone do not have a fm receiver built in.
Could this be part of a students technology project next year?

A possible way to install icecast server on Ubuntu
http://askubuntu.com/questions/28496/how-do-i-setup-an-icecast-server-for-broadcasting-audio-in-my-network