max2play/Squeezeplug going Sonos

[Cyfect]

Cyfect

1. Dezember 2015 at 14:51 #17079

Hey,

We have this fantastic LMS/squeezebox platform called max2play/Squeezeplug.(btw is squeezeplug.eu down or what’s going on with the standalone project?)
And as flexible and and powerfull as it already is we can take it one step futher. Why settle for this if we can fully imitate the sonos experience?

whereby you have units who can be powered on and immediatly check for wifi and or lan connection. sonos has its own proprietary wireless network. We can do this too.
The standard rasbian os already includes support for usb wifi dongles. And there are a few full compatible rasberri pi clones involving standard buildin wifi chips(G/N) such as banana pi, orange pi and lemon pi.

The server component can easily be configured to broadcast its own wifi network(while not broadcasting the SSID, thus keeping it unobtrustively hidden) right out of the box. A network name and/or wifi password using wpa2 can be preset. Max2play can opt for the very crowded 2,5GHz spectrum or the empty 5GHz spectrum. (depending on if you prefer low interference or not, both speeds should be enough to stream even HQ music)

Then the client component can be configured to activate the wifi network to look for a preset ssid and submit the password. All right out of the box. Then the squeezelite software takes over and goes looking on the network for the LMS server and connects to it(this second step is already happening with PiCorePlayer-you might get them on this train too-)

So you now have a fully userfriendly way of setting up a multiroom audio system with minimal configuration efforts.

If a handy person wants you can take it one step futher still. Combine a PI(or clone) with hifiberry AMP+, a loose speaker and put it in an wooden enclosure you can have the real thing only at half of the price(depending on your vendor sources)

What do you guy’s think?

[Heiner premium]

Heiner premium

2. Dezember 2015 at 15:29 #17097

Hi Cyfect,
Very interesting ideas! There are obviously some logistical issues but some of your proposed steps are certainly possiblities for Max2Play’s future. Thanks for your active interest in Max2Play and if you want to start the development in this direction, we would welcome you looking into our developer’s corner: https://www.max2play.com/en/developers-corner/
Regarding SqueezePlug, we have not had contact to the them in a while. However, Max2Play is still keeping this project very much alive.

[Cyfect]

Cyfect

3. Dezember 2015 at 13:10 #17110

Yes, But the last part about a hardware system is pure for the enthousiasts. So dont mind that

Its weird nobody else has thought about this. But it makes perfectly sense. not many people have network cables all over the house. And to move a unit is a real pain then. Im no dev type but a short google search learned me quite a bit.

You have many guide’s to setup an RPi accesspoint(this is for the server)
https://learn.adafruit.com/setting-up-a-raspberry-pi-as-a-wifi-access-point/preparation
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-a-WiFi-Access-Point-out-of-a-Raspberry/
https://www.maketecheasier.com/set-up-raspberry-pi-as-wireless-access-point/
And you have the Pi-Point software http://www.pi-point.co.uk/

The adafruit guide includes specific adafruit(apparantly for realtek chipsets) dongle drivers. Maketecheasier seems a good guide as well. As it uses generic software.

From here on i think it should be relatively easy to automate these steps into the setup sequence.

For the client, things seem much easier. everything is already present on rasbian OS.
There is an official rpi guide here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/wireless-cli.md

And one with roughly the same info: http://weworkweplay.com/play/automatically-connect-a-raspberry-pi-to-a-wifi-network/

The good thing is you can preconfigure the network it connects to. This is perfectly for our goal.

Hopefully someone ferments this into workable scripts and setup/config files.
You might want to contact the guy’s of PiCorePlayer as well to create an image with the same method. So they can support this too. Lets make the squeezebox experience better for everyone 🙂

[levos67 premium]

levos67 premium

15. Oktober 2019 at 22:47 #47308

but serveces like Spotify etc will only be availabel with bluetooth.
A pre conf image (SD) should not be a big problem (for server and client) but still the question, WHY?

Leon V