Components.
- A broken radio from ebay for £5
- A pair of speakers from a couple of bookshelf speakers that were sitting unused in my garage
- A Raspberry PI Zero W ( I bought the version where you has to solder on the header - about £7)
- A JustBoom Amp Zero pHAT that is a combined DAC and AMP - they retail at around £24 and can push out up to 40W per channel.
- An official 5volt 3W power supply retails at £7.50
So altogether £43.50
Build
- Ripped out the radio’s original tinny speakers and inserted the drivers from my bookshelf speakers. The actual physical dimensions were the same;
- Soldered the headers on the PI W and mounted the DAC/AMP;
- The Justboom amp/dac comes with an IR receiver to allow you to control it with an IR remote - I glued that between the speakers and connected it the DAC/AMP;
- Burnt volumio on an SD card I already had;
- Connected the speakers to the DAC/AMP outputs;
- A Smart Plug the Alexa can control.
- An otg cable to allow me to add a usb stick or drive
- I have a USB HDD that I use for all sorts of things attached to my Broadband Router - Contains roughly 650 albums mostly in FLAC
Usage
- I switch it on by simply asking Alexa to turn on the Smart Plug - this boots up volumio;
- In general, once it emits the “booted up sound” I use Alexa to control what to play, the volume, pausing, playing etc using IFTT and the Volumio Rest API’s - see this excellent post https://forum.volumio.org/volumio-controlled-amazon-alexa-t7967.html
- I have my Logitech Harmony Elite/Harmony hub set up to control it but I hardly ever use it;
- I sometimes use Airplay to stream from my Iphone and I also have the volumio apps on my apple and android devices;
- If I’m using my Win 10 laptop I use the Web UI for control.
6.When I have decided to finish listening I use anything other than Alexa to get Volumio to shutdown Volumio (so the SD card based OS doesn’t get corrupted)
7 After waiting a few seconds for the shutdown to happen I ask Alexa to turn of the smart plug.
I can thoroughly recommend the PI W and Justboom DAC/AMP pair which is surprising loud
From the outside it looks just like a nice little radio.
