This is an update on the Raspberry Pi Internet Radio project I'm doing with my brother. My brother is making the cabinet. I am doing the electronics.
The Raspberry Pi will source audio from BLE, WiFi Internet sources, or music stored on the SD card or a USB memory stick. A Raspberry Pi 3B is fully capable in this application and in tests so far streams audio without pauses.
The amplifier hat uses the TAS5713 chipset and was purchased on Amazon and provides easy hookup to speakers. Power for the amplifier is supplied to the hat (12V to 20V) and a regulator onboard provides 5V power to the Raspberry Pi. We are using old laptop power "bricks" for power. The hat has worked without issue with the Moode software.
MoOde was selected because it is free, open source, and can perform the functions required. It is regularly maintained and has an active forum. I recommend setting it up using an Ethernet connection as I was unable to do it over WiFi (quite probably my fault) and Ethernet was easy. The Web Browser interface is clean and attractive but it isn't a standard layout and I stumbled around while trying to figure out where things were. The user documentation is minimal and while everything appears covered in the forum it can be hard to find. Kind of like the new e14 forum :-)
I'm going to have to write a simplified manual for my brother since he didn't know what a Raspberry Pi was before I explained it to him. Unfortunately there may be some things that he has to do initially with SSH but nothing too difficult. It turns out that MoOde has an SSH terminal built into the web interface, something I had never seen before. So I don't have to get him to load a terminal onto his computer. Cool.
MoOde was written for browser use on a tablet or computer but there appear to be several methods one could control it with physical buttons, encoders, and switches.
- Over USB to the Pi
- GPIO on the Pi
A microcontroller with USB keyboard emulation would be used in the first case. In the second, the input could go directly to the Pi.
My brother sent me a new sketch of what he has in mind for the cabinet.
He wanted to know how large the interior needed to be to fit the electronics so I made a rough and blocky 3D CAD model.
It will be at least 12"W x 7"H x 6" deep. About the size of a shoe box. He isn't finished with his design though and I'm still trying to talk him into an LCD display.
This coming week I'll be working on the physical controls.
