I wanted to share a small Raspberry Pi 5 Volumio build I have been working on.
This is not meant to be a fancy commercial hi-fi unit. It is just a clean, purpose-built Volumio appliance with M.2 storage, DAC output, PoE, and a small LCD status screen.
The hardware is only half of it. The other half is the display program, which is written in C.
Instead of running a desktop, browser, kiosk mode, or a heavy plugin just to show basic music info, the program writes directly to the Linux framebuffer.
No X11.
No Wayland.
No Chromium.
No full UI stack sitting in the background.
The goal was simple: show useful Volumio information without wasting the Pi.
The LCD shows:
- Time
- Song title
- Artist
- Playback state
- Network status
- Offline status
- Simple visual feedback
- Large clock mode when nothing is playing
- Smaller clock with track info when music is active
- Blinking colon as a simple heartbeat indicator
The enclosure was designed around the actual hardware stack, not a generic Pi layout.
Hardware used:
- Raspberry Pi 5
- Waveshare PCIe to M.2 Adapter with PoE Function and active cooling
- 128GB NVMe M.2 storage
- InnoMaker HiFi DAC Pro
- Waveshare 3.5 inch RPi LCD
The OpenSCAD case includes cutouts for USB-C, HDMI, audio jacks, Ethernet, USB, and MicroSD. It also has bottom intake vents, side fin vents, stronger M2.5 mounting points, lid screws, subtle DAC jack labels, and solid sticky-foot pads so the unit can sit on its side with the DAC ports facing up.
A lot of Pi Volumio builds are either bare boards, generic cases, or full touchscreen setups running more software than I wanted. This one is more of a simple audio appliance. Nothing special, just built for the exact parts I had on the bench.
I am including the source files, OpenSCAD design files, the C display program, a compiled binary, install notes, and the BOM in case it helps anyone else building something similar.
