Wow, this is the first I’ve seen the reduction of Oracle free tier - will dig into that before I get an unexpected bill!

I’ve been meaning to put something like this in my setup for a while, but definitely not this now! List of alternatives in the Custom Communication section at awesome selfhosted

If you expect it to be flaky you could get one of those old school mechanical time switches with the clicky pegs (or a more modern digital equivalent) and just have it set to power down for 1 click, normally 15 mins, at 4am or whenever suits you - minimally technically complicated and guaranteed stability through planned instability!

Thanks for the recommendation, will give that a further look.

I have played with Pinchflat as mentioned by another poster. I’ve found that some of the ones that aren’t on YouTube, you can use AudioBookShelf or similar in conjunction with a vpn set to a non core country for the podcast, you can either remove or at least greatly reduce the ad inserts.

Have an experiment with that, I use a gluetun docker and link my ABS docker to that.

Its certainly doable, you just need to decide on where you want to start as a minimum viable product and tinker along as you go but ideally think far enough ahead about ideal situation so you don’t paint yourself into a corner and have to restart from scratch to get a certain outcome, although the Pi is pretty flexible for the power you’ll need.

I did this around 20 years ago (obviously not with a Pi back then) but as things changed I came round to the less hassle option of a phone and Bluetooth, particularly as I was often driving cars I couldn’t tinker with too much.

I had an implementation with a fold out 1 DIN touch screen which replaced the stereo and handled audio amplification etc and one with a stand alone hot plug 7" touchscreen. I had a reserve battery so that it stayed powered up for a short period of time after parking at home to do playlist and podcast synchronisation to my server in the house.

As other people have mentioned I was using Kodi and running audio from it as well as satnav etc. Mp3car was a good resource at the time.