Hi everyone,
As a newcomer of this part of the forum, I wanted to share with you my latest project based on volumio…
I have been dealing with audiophile distributions for quite some time and I finally ended up with volumio after many tests on many different HW and software platforms. I started a few years back with the early builds of daphile. Then I went through vortexbox, tinysqueeze among others.
I started at a time where raspeberries were just introduced somehow …and my first tests were actually performed using thin clients…Doing these very first tests, I discovered with some friends working with me on these projects that the power supply part had a tremendous impact on the final sounding result. We did also some comparison between X86 boards and raspberry PI and decided to stick to some X86 board. We did try several x86 board as well and sticked to an asrock one in the end.
My idea was to get a streamer that could integrate well with the rest of the different components of my hifi system. I actually built 2 streamers in two different chassis for the two hifi systems that I own. I wanted the streamer to be able to display infos just like a cd player would do, meaning having a 16x2 lcd at the minimum to show artist name and song…
As I said earlier, we gave a lot of importance to the power supply part. The person in charge of this part is actually a former R&D Engineer from one of the world leading companies in computer market. He was formerly in charge of designing power supplies for desktops. Therefore, he naturally thought about a way of providing the best power supply for this streamer.
I would look after testing the different linux distros and he would build the best power supply for the streamer.
Our bill of materials would be as follow:
1 x chassis (matching the brand look and feel of the pre owned hifi equipment)
1 x x86 motherboard ; Asrock
2 x 2Gigas Ram Moduules
1 x Small SSD drive to host volumio bits ( All my music is sitting on a Synology ds1511+ Nas)
1 x Power supply for the X86 board
1 x Power Supply for the transport part
Some connections part (usb ports, Hdmi Port, Rj45 port, AES Port, etc)
Some usb cables
2 x Adafruit USB to serial LCD Backpack + 2 x 16x2 LCDs RGB
1 x Schaffner IEC plug
Some soldering skills…
I started by buying an old accuphase digital tuner from 1995 in Russia . The device was no longer working as the satellite service is no longer provided. It cost a few hundred euros but at least, I had the accuphase chassis I wanted (rock solid and well designed). this will happen to be quite useful when dealing with the integration odf the different parts…
Once all the parts were in, I setup the volumio bits and started to work with another colleague on the LCDs part of this project :
As you can see, information is displayed in the following order from right to left :
Using the two serial backpacks, both lcds are appearing under /dev/ttyacm0 and1 on volumio. I am leveraging the lcdbackpack python library to do the display.
The data is retrieved using an python mpd client for files and radio based music
1st screen shows Artist’s Name and Album’s Title, the second screen shows Song’s Title as well as bitrate infos.
When playing webradios, it would display as follows :
1st screen shows Radio’s Name and Webradio underneath , the second screen shows Artist / Song’s Title as well as bitrate infos.
I am currently working on the qobuzz part but there , I must admit we face some issues as we don’t know yet how / where to retrieve the infos from ?
should we talk to upmpdcli ? or interrogate qobuzz api ? or socket.io for the volumio websocket api ??
Any advice in welcome…
The code we are developping is python based; it is available here:
This is not final yet but we are definitely heading in the right direction
If you are interested in knowing more about thje power supply part, feel free to visit the following site : roseaudio.fr/english/
In the vintage part, you can see some early work I did on some former sony ES tuner…
Any comments or questions are welcome
pattdepanick.