alien radio





 what was my role?
i tackled most of the hardware setup, such as fitting everything into the case and soldering wires to the knobs onto connector for easy removal without sacrificing connection stability. me and another collaborator worked on the Arduino code,  though it was my changes that got things running as best they could. prior to optimization, the serial communication would slow down exponentially and resulted in a very unsatisfying user experience that became less responsive the longer it ran.


what is it about?
alien radio is an experience where the user plays as an employee of an interstellar planet discovery agency, searching for signals from planets far away. with the help of a modified radio and a guidebook, the user “tunes in” to each planet to look at the colored lights and to compare the descriptions in a provided guidebook.

on a technical level, the project involves Unity, an Arduino microcontroller and serial communication to provide Unity with information about the three potentiometer’s states, and Unity sends information back to the Arduino to control the state of the lights. aside from an added knob on the top, the original tuning and volume dials from the chosen radio’s design are used in order to make things feel as authentic as possible. even the string-powered tuning indicator still works!

in its original incarnation, the Unity portion was intended to be hidden from sight and the lights were to come on the radio itself, but this had to be omitted due to part shortage and case tolerance issues :(



images - assembling the alien radio


the very first incarnation, where the setup was tested on a breadboard. not pictured here are the three knobs - at this point they were already fitted inside of the radio
fitting the potentiometers on the place of the original knobs, which involved dremeling and removing lots of components on the original logic board to make them both fit. re-stringing the tuning dial was a nightmare...
the last step of modifying the alien radio, where the wires were soldered up and the Arduino microcontroller was ready to be fitted inside. the speaker was also re-wired to the headphone jack, allowing sound to be piped through it.

images - on location

i regrettably only have this one photo of the setup, but this was the ideal place (had the LEDs worked as originally intended) with the computer placed out of view. in order to let people carefully listen with the ability for others to still hear it, a Y-splitter was placed in line with the radio’s speaker and the headphones pictured to the left. a nicely detailed handbook by Andrew F. was also included in order to give a fictional reason for the alien radio’s existence. 
©2026 isiah f