Two years ago, I gave this minimal Volumio box to my dad

…and today I set it up with the current version of Volumio.

But let’s start earlier: He likes to listen to music and has a nice collection of CDs. Unfortunately when they moved and got new furniture, there was too little space for all of them. And that’s when Volumio entered the room: I surprised him with a small music box that he could set up with his existing home stereo system. The following weeks, he digitized all his CDs and since then, he’s using Volumio almost exclusively.

Unfortunately, now the SD card wouldn’t boot up again, so I received the box back, re-flashed the card and set it up again. But that’s a good chance to finally document my build!

The open box shows all main components:

  • Raspberry Pi 3A+
  • Justboom DAC Zero pHat
  • DC input and RCA connectors
  • Custom hat for buttons and status led
  • Buttons and led on front panel

The buttons are on/off and play/pause. The led is lit when the box is on.

Configuration is as follows:

GPIO Buttons
	Enable Play/Pause: On
	GPIO Pin: 6
	Enable Shutdown: On
	GPIO Pin: 4
GPIO Control
	System Startup Event: On
	GPIO Pin: 26
	GPIO State: On
	Delay: No delay
	Duration: Continuous

The on/off button is also wired to GPIO 3, which is also used by the DAC. GPIO 3 and GPIO 4 are isolated against one another with two diodes. This allows for shutdown (via software) and reboot (via reset through the SCL line). Obviously iniating a shutdown interferes with DAC operation through i2s, but it’s not audible and the system is shutting down anyway, so why bother?!

The case isn’t pretty but gets the job done. Total cost was below 100€. Setup today was less than half an hour.

I’d like to give a HUGE thank you to the entire Volumio team! This is a tremendously useful project and the quality of execution is excellent.

5 Likes

This is very nice. I want to add these buttons to my own box. Thanks for the info.

On my current Ras Pi box I upgraded my DAC to a HifiBerry Dac2 HD. It makes a huge difference. I had no idea the bass could be so beautiful.