By Michael Kotzolt
translated by Heiner Uebbing
The wish for a mobile boombox with LMS is one I have had for a long time. It should be something that works at home and on vacation without the hassle of plugging everything out and in again and it should be portable. Battery powered with at least ten hours without recharging. Since the Raspberry Pi 2B with Quadcore came out, it was clear this had to be the fitting server.
For the amplifier, I chose the HiFiBerry Amp+. First equipped with a 2 1/2″ hard drive, later changed to a 128 Gb RAID0 Hardwarecontroller for four 32Gb SD cards due to capacity reasons. (Perl) A great product with very little battery drain. I plan to expand to a second controller once the collection exceeds 128 Gb.
For the power supply I chose a 20A solar control unit because have a low price point and are already equipped with deep discharge protection and a pre-programmable switch-off time. For voltage control, there is a China voltmeter for 1,50 € in place since you should always know when the music stops. For safety, one can also just use the main breaker to disconnect everything from the battery.
The whole system is running on Max2Play using the Access Point function with a EDIMAX EW-7612UAn WiFi-Stick as the access point. For this USB WiFi-Stick Max2Play recently integrated the necessary drivers into the system. The stick with its external antenna offers more connection range. The stereo in my home is supported by a TizzBird F20 (Ebay 8-10€). It automatically boots and is then connected via WiFi to the mobile Squeezebox Server. For use as a pure music player the processor power is more than enough.
