4 years ago, I built a LMS/Squeezelite streamer for my main listening
spot in the living room. It used a RaspberryPi 3B and the original
Audiophonics ES9038Q2M DAC hat.
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The 9038Q2M DAC allows for 2 OLED displays to be connected. One to the
DAC to display its data, like audio input, stream and volume and one
connected to RPi GPIO, used to display LMS streaming and song
information. I designed and 3D printed a little case for it. I used the
DietPi distro since (at the time) I couldnt get the OLED to work with
LMS/Squeezelite on piCorePlayer.
After I saw a few nice current commercial streamers, like Hifi Rose RS
series (way out of my price range), I took up the idea to make something
like that myself. I briefly signed up for a Roon trial, but deleted that
within a day. Not for us. Were long time Squeezebox/LMS users and have
it all through the house and its WAF is unbeatable. With Roon you cant
control anything (without a smartphone) on a SqueezePlay-O2Joggler on
the bathroom wall, playing through ceiling speakers. It will work as an
endpoint, but you wont be able to use the touchscreen to change radio
channels or music. Long live LMS.
The little OLEDs on my streamer werent of much use when youre sitting
a few meters away from them. So I upgraded the living room system,
connected to an integrated amp and speakers, to a new RPi4 with a SMSL
9038Pro USB-DAC and connected to the TV to view (and control) the
Material skin from a comfortable distance.
That left me with the 9038Q2M DAC hat and the RPi. Since the living room
is a shared space, in which not everybody shares my taste in music, I
decided to build myself a nice dedicated LMS headphone streamer.
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THE BUILD
Its built mostly with parts that I had laying around. I did decide to
upgrade the RPi and replace it with a RPi4 that I had in use for a less
power hungry task. That runs fine on the RPi3b now. During the building
process the 9038Q2M suddenly decided to stop transferring any sound and
because everything was already designed around that board, I needed a
new one. Audiophonics now sells a new version with USB-C. After it
arrived I noticed more differences between the original and new version.
The second, GPIO controlled, OLED connection is gone and the firmware is
changed so that the DAC OLED turns black after about 20 seconds and only
returns with information when the resolution of the music stream
changes.
With some extra work and making some wire connections that would better
attach to the short GPIO pins on the DAC hat, Ive most things working
as before. Only waiting for a new firmware that keeps the DAC OLED on
all the time when music plays, just like before with the original one.
HARDWARE
The case is made from 3mm black acrylic. Designed in FreeCAD and laser
cut on my diode laser engraver/cutter. The 2 OLEDs are mounted on a
custom, 3D printed bracket which is glued to the acrylic.
The headphone amp, a Micromega MyZic, that I hadnt used in years, ever
since my (then) new integrated amp came with a built-in headphone
output, proved to be perfect for the job.
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Its a great single pcb design with on-board (completely silent)
switching power supply. The volume potentiometer is put straight on the
board and the original aluminium knob fits the indentation of the
original plastic case. Since an indentation wasnt a viable option, I
had to re-engineer the knob, make it as large as possible and 3D print
it.
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-(Photo text says RPi4, the trained eye will see a RPi3
. Photo was
taken before I decided to use the RPi4)-
I did have to buy the LCD (wide) touchscreen. A Waveshare 7.9 HDMI
1280x400 px, which is designed to fit the RPi on its back. On top of the
RPI4 sits the Audiophonics ES9038Q2M USB-C DAC.
5V Power for the touchscreen, RPi and the DAC comes from an iFi iPower X
wall PSU that I used before. Ive taken it out of its original enclosure
and created a 3D printed case to keep it safe from touching it
accidentally when working inside the case.
The 5V/3A output from the iFi PSU connects to an Audiophonics Pi-SPC V2
power management board (no longer available, theres a newer REG version
now). This allows the use of a push button switch, with LED, to safely
start and shutdown the RPi, preventing damage to the SD card. The
Audiophonics DAC pcb has a header to connect the control signals for
boot and shutdown which connects through to the RPi GPIO.
A SD card extension to the front panel allows for easy access to the SD
card.
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On the back are the mains C8-8 cable connector and switch as well as
extension cords for USB and ethernet to the RPi.
SOFTWARE
My setup runs on DietPi which is a great, lean distro for this purpose.
Ive installed (among others):
- Squeezelite; obviously
- Plymouth / Plymouth Themes; to replace the boot splash screen with a
(in my case customised) graphical boot screen (see at
https://youtu.be/t-FuKOdQan8)
- Audiophonics Pi-SPC; plugin for power management through the Pi-SPC
V2 board
- Chromium; webbrowser for viewing LMS Material skin on touchscreen
- DietPi-dashboard; great web utility to manage and view your DietPi
setup remotely in a webbrowser, everything from CPU load, temp, RAM,
network, processes and services and a terminal screen as well as
remote shutdown and reboot.
- I2C; for OLED control
- Luma.examples; OLED driver and software utility to customise
contents of the info on the OLED. In my case info about time, network,
RAM and CPU temp.
ISSUES
Apart from the differences between the original and new version of the
9038Q2M boards, I ran into other issues.
One is that the boot process still shows parts of the boot/splash even
though Plymouth Themes takes away a lot of that. Just not everything.
That wouldve been ideal
.
Another was the power sensitivity of the RPi4. The DAC board is designed
to take power through the USB-C connector and pass that through to the
RPi via the GPIO connector. The touchscreen gets its power from the USB
port of the RPi which also handles the touch mouse. That worked well
with the RPi3b, but with the RPi4 I would get the flashing Thunderbolt
icon, indicating under voltage, all the time. When I soldered a 2 pin
JST-XH connector to the DAC boards 5V input (an already provided
alternative for the USB-C connector) and used thicker wires than the
standard header wires, the number of under voltage messages reduced
significantly. I measured a total current draw of 1.5A when in use. Well
within the limits of the iFi iPower X PSU at max. 3A. Only after I
connected an extra set of thicker wires in parallel, directly from the
power management board to the 5V and ground pins on the GPIO header all
under voltage errors were gone.
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- Raspberry Pi 3B (LMS server)
- SB Boom
- 2x O2Joggler/SqueezePlay
- DietPi-RPi4/SqueezeLite/SMSL SU-9n(DAC)/HDMI 4k TV
- DietPi-RPi3B/SqueezeLite/Audiophonics 9038Q2M Sabre
DAC/2xOLED+Waveshare 7.9LCD
- piCorePlayer/Rpi2/Hifiberry Digi+
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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