Another Raspberry Pi Radio

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Here is one more Raspberry Pi Internet Radio based on Rapberry Pi B+ board,
HiFiBerry DAC+, Adafruit Class D 20W Amplifier and Adafruit TFT LCD
touchscreen. The software is Raspbian, mpd and custom mpd client written
in Python using PyGame library.

An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.


An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.


An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.


An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.


An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
 
Very nice. Would you please by any chance publish the gamepy gui sources for learning?

It's still work in progress. Whenever it's in more or less "publishable" state I'll share the code. I borrowed the main principles for this client from this radio player:
https://learn.adafruit.com/raspberry-pi-radio-player-with-touchscreen/installing-the-radioplayer
You can easily adapt it for your needs. Here is the screenshot of my client:

An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
 
...You can still control the unit through android apps?

Theoretically yes, but I don't have this functionality in my client though I'm
planning to add it. Right now you can control player using USB mouse, keyboard,
touchscreen, rotary encoders (volume, navigation). I also connected and configured
infrared sensor but unfortunately either LCD driver or PyGame blocks that sensor.
So it's not functional at the moment.
 
I've been closely following this thread. Your design looks very good. You've made it very compact. Doesn't look like DIY at all. I also want to go a similar project. How does this sound? A friend of mine who has used Rpi in the past tell me the sound quality is terrible and is very sensitive to the input voltage. May be it was improved with latter models of the pi.
 
I've been closely following this thread. Your design looks very good. You've made it very compact. Doesn't look like DIY at all. I also want to go a similar project. How does this sound? A friend of mine who has used Rpi in the past tell me the sound quality is terrible and is very sensitive to the input voltage. May be it was improved with latter models of the pi.

As you probably know there are several ways to get sound from RPi:
1. Use on-board 3.5 audio jack
2. Use USB connector of RPi as output to USB DAC or any other USB
audio system
3. Use HDMI connector of RPi as audio/video output to HDMI system for
example to your TV
4. Use I2S signal from on-board GPIO connector as a source of audio signal.

Which way we are talking about?

If you need high quality audio from RPi for example to reproduce lossless formats
like FLAC etc. then I would recommend to use the last approach as the first three
either don't provide high quality or more difficult to handle. From those three the
first approach is the worst one and I believe nobody will use it for high quality audio.

RPi has I2S signals available on its GPIO on-board connector. This is the same
signal which you have between your CD transport and DAC in your CD player.
Some third-party companies produce DAC boards which you can plug into that
connector. Those DACs are of pretty good quality based on the same DAC chips
as any other DACs. There are also boards available which use I2S as input and
SPDIF as output. Also there are boards which have DAC and Class-D amplifier
on the same board. So in this case the quality of your audio will be defined mostly
by the board(s) which you plug into RPi. The RPi itself provides high-quality (PCM)
signal over I2S.

In this particular RPi Radio I use HiFiBerry DAC+ and Adafruit Amplifier. Also
I use two switching power supplies +5V and +12V. As I mentioned already the
noise level was terrible when I've used combined power supply which had two
voltages. When I started using two separate supplies the noise level reduced but
was still audible. Then I found that if I connect to the network using Ethernet cable
the noise level is much lower than if I connect using WiFi. When I connected using
WiFi you literally can hear when WiFi works - when LED on USB WiFi dongle is
blinking at the same time you can hear the noise.

Now I always use wired network connection and pretty satisfied with sound
quality. Is it audiophile high quality? No, but this is just boombox. If you really
need audiophile high quality system based on RPi use either I2S to SPDIF
board (e.g. HiFiBerry Digi+) or DAC and either connect your high quality
DAC to SPDIF or your high quality amplifier to DAC output. This is what I'm
doing in my other RPi system - OpenElec (or whatever they call it now) player.
 
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