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Audio

Audio, Stereo, and Speaker Mods

C.H.I.P Resurrection

I was one of the lucky people to buy multiple C.H.I.P’s as part of the Kick Starter campaign. So far I’ve honestly not used them for much and they were gathering dust. As part of my ventures into Home Assistant, I wanted zoned audio. So it made sense to try Shairport-Sync on the Chip’s. In general is should be easy enough to get it sorted, in 3 lines your done. Unfortunately previous projects on the Chip’s made them unusable, so they needed re-imaging. Unfortunately the company is no longer supporting them, but thankfully their guides, flash images and community are still preserved. I had tried previously to reimage using windows running VirtualBox, but there was USB driver issues. A physical Ubuntu box worked fine. This script makes flashing them a breeze. Followed by this guide… Read More »C.H.I.P Resurrection

Bluetooth Speakers and Squeezeslave

The setup serving audio in our kitchen was pretty conviluded and had a few too many cables jammed into a cupboard: A thin-client with powered speakers, attached to a wireless access point set to client mode. I picked up a newer set of powered speakers that came with a 30 pin iPod/iPad dock – so I looked online and found an attachment for the iPod dock that converts it to a Bluetooth audio receiver (similar to this), so you can connect with any Bluetooth enabled music device (phone, laptop, etc.). I have a laptop (Media Director for LinuxMCE) hooked up to a TV in a close room that’s on most of the time anyway, so I paired the Bluetooth receiver to a laptop and setup squeezeslave to pass audio to the speakers. In summary: Before… Read More »Bluetooth Speakers and Squeezeslave

New speaker back.

Cheap Pickups: Vistar Audio 250W Panel Amp

Picked up either a 450W or 250W/360W sub woofer panel amplifier: $10. As you can see from the pics below, there aren’t any identifying model numbers on it except “AUDIO 9911061”. Had to fix the cable from the volume/frequency/IR PCB, then plugged it into see if it works… It does and works very well! When playing thumping bass, a carpeted speaker box with a 600W Kicker Sub moves along the floor! Next, sub woofer races!! The metal rattling is the “Man Cave” roof, and yes I know the box is way too small for the sub. An few interesting features are: When turning up or down the frequency or volume using the remote, the knobs are rotated using small motors on the rear of them. The volume and frequency knobs also have LED’s in them… Read More »Cheap Pickups: Vistar Audio 250W Panel Amp

HP T5500 series Squeezeslave V2

If you haven’t figured out by now, I’ve been keen on small network sound devices for a while, although this should be the last revision. As a carry on from this article, I’ve kept with OpenWRT but moved to a different architecture (arm -> x86) to support the thinclients I have and will be getting. In comparison the wireless router was easy to get the base image installed but Squeezeslave wasn’t. This time the base image was stupidly difficult, and Squeezeslave was a cut’n’paste job. The reason why I couldn’t use a pre-built image was because the x86 image doesn’t support booting from a USB device and it needed sound card support. This article doesn’t cover making the image from scratch, just installing the image I created for the HP t5500 series. I did however… Read More »HP T5500 series Squeezeslave V2

Turn a WRT350Nv2 into a Squeezeslave (networked audio)

Brought a WRT350N v2 from the flea markets last week ($20), installed OpenWRT 10.03.1 using the WinXP firmware upgrade utility. After that installed I then installed some additional packages (full list). So at this point I was able to insert a cheap USB sound card in the rear and it would detect it. I was able to change the volume using alsamixer for testing. Now for the frustrating part, cross compiling squeezeslave to execute it on the WRT350Nv2. I tried a few precompiled binaries, but they were no good. The basic steps I took were: Download OpenWRT SDK. Make sure you’ve gotten the required packages installed in your host machine, check here as a reference. Download additional packages for the router using opkg or the web-interface, this will allow the use of the USB port and install alsa for… Read More »Turn a WRT350Nv2 into a Squeezeslave (networked audio)

Network Audio from Thinclient

This is an extension to HP T5000 As a Network Stereo. Rather than use the thin client as a fully qualified MD where boot times are slow, and it has a lot of non-required process’s running on it, etc… I’ve decided to explore the possibility of making a DIY squeezebox. I figured the Logitechs’ squeezebox would have lower specifications as far as CPU, RAM and storage are concerned. First Option: SqueezeOS Followed this tutorial and it created the images for an arm processor… Failed many times while trying to create a qemux86 and BootCDx86 base. I had tried using many different toolchains although it got to about a days worth of time when the idea was scrapped. Second Option: Andriod install with Squeeze Player App. This was a short lived idea as Andriodx86 ports needed… Read More »Network Audio from Thinclient