IJskegel from The Netherlands says hi

Volumio Community Forums Introduce Yourself
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Hi all,

First of all I wish everyone a happy and healthy 2021!

Because of the situation in the world I had and still have to work from home. I’m a software developer and like to listen to music (ripped CDs and webradio) while coding. I did not want to use the laptop from work for this as they would rather not have me install software on it unless absolutely necessary to do my job. So the first couple of months I used an old laptop, connected my iFi Zen Dac to it and enjoyed listening to music using my DT770 headphones. Unfortunately that laptop runs hot very quickly and makes the fan spin almost always at max RPM making an annoying sound. That made me look for an alternative solution. While browsing the web I stumbled upon volumio and installed it on an ancient raspberry pi 1 B I had lying around. The install process was very easy: download the image, write it to an SD card, startup the pi and configure the network. It worked perfectly and to my surprise the pi was actually able to power the iFi Zen Dac through USB without any problems. The biggest surprise was the quality of the sound, it was way better than when I used the old laptop. The only ‘problem’ I had was that the UI of volumio was not very responsive, which was to be expected from this old hardware.

I thought about having some physical buttons to control the pi. I’d like to have shutdown, play/pause, previous and next buttons (using as few buttons as possible using short press and long press). Maybe I can even display some information on an oled display I used for an old project that I never finished. While tinkering with scripts to handle the button presses I screwed up the volumio system (being used to debian based linux distros I did an “apt update && apt upgrade” which in hindsight was not the most clever thing to do). I decided it was time to get me another raspberry pi so that I would have one stable system to use for my music and another one for playing around. I got an excellent deal on a used raspberry pi 3 B (20 euros, it even came with the official wall adapter, 16 GB SD card and case). This one is now serving as my daily driver and the raspberry pi 1B is used to develop the button control and display addon.

I will visit the forum occasionally, maybe I will ask for help and where possible I will try to help others.

Thanks to all the developers of volumio and keep up the good work!

/ijskegel

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Welcome!
Volumio provides a list of plugin to add features. One of these is gpio plugin that should allow you to do what you want easily. Check in plugins list

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apt update << is good
apt upgrade <<< will break volumio

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Yeah, I know, but it does not support short and long press, does it?

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That is what I found out the hard way. But, installing a fresh copy of volumio is not much work, especially if you don’t have a lot configured already, so it was not much of a problem.

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Hi ijskegel! The last couple of warm days in the Netherlands must have been hard for you!

I also have a iFi Zen DAC and hooked it up to a Rock64 (raspberry alternative). All works fine with Airplay but Spotify Connect’s audio quality is better therefore I wanted to get that working. My question is: can you get the volume control working with the Spotify Connect plugin? I get to the point where the spotify volume control via the Hardware mixer setting controls the volume level in Volumio, but nothing happens to the sound.

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:joy: :joy: :joy:

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waterpoelke?

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:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
no worry, cold is back again

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Sorry for the late response (I’ve been in the freezer most of the time :slight_smile: ). As far as I know there is no volume hardware control possible with the ZEN DAC.

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i always getting the chill’s of you ijskegel are you eating a nought ? that’s why you need a bite of broodjekaas?