Hi,
I’m using Volumio since many years now, thanks to the great team and their hard work, and it’s now time to share my realization.
The system is based on a RPi 3, with Kali and Piano 2.1, configured in dual-mono mode. What I had to do was just to add a proper power supply, and to put everything in a nice box.
I had no possibility to properly cut an aluminum front plate to integrate a display, so I prefer to avoid destroying the nice housing I found on Ali Express.
For the power supply, I designed this red PCB, to integrate all the different parts found on ebay or amazon. It prevented me to drill too much holes in the bottom of the housing, which is always a pain as I’m not well equipped to work on metal.
In brief, I’ve got some AC/DC converter (the black box on the left bottom corner) which is producing a permanent 5V to power some relays, and the Nanomesher Pi-Switch.
When turning on with the switch, relays are commuted, and the toroidal transformer is powered, to produce 2x8V AC.
Each channel of the transformer is then powering a channel of the linear AC/DC converter, adjusted to produce a 5.25V voltage.
One of the channel directly powers the RPi.
The other channel goes through a very low noise LPS (TPS7A4700 module), which is used to power the Piano 2.1.
To turn the system off, the Pi-Switch from Nanomesher is doing all the job of managing the interruption to the RPi, wait for RPi shutdown and finally commute the relays to turn off the power supply at the transformer level.
I reserved some space on the board to embed a 12V AC/DC converter, which was originally planned to power an USB hub, dedicated to an HDD. But I had some problems with HDD not seen at startup, and it was necessary to reboot the PI to get the HDD detected. At the end, I dropped this idea, and I’m now using a NAS.
Everything works like a charm since several month now. I especially like the heavy and dynamic bass produced by the Piano, with the help of my Musical Fidelity A5 (Pre + Amp), as well as home made Triangle Lyrr 222
A friend of mine, equipped with AudioNote Amp, and especially Avant Garde Trio, found it better than his Musical Fidelity DAC.
Again, thanks a lot for Volumio team for the great job they made all this past few years !
A nice project!