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Introducing my (slightly larger than) credit card linux based FLAC server!

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Jul 4, 2008
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Alright I think some of you on the forums might like to try building this.

I stumbled upon a open source linux distribution kernel called raspyfi (it's now out of date) and now officially called Volumnio though this is still in a beta phase.
It is built for the Raspberry Pi
512mb revB or higher. The Raspberry Pi is based on a 700Mhz single core ARM 6v with 512Mb of ram and a graphics co-processor. This is a not a very powerful processor but compared to a Arduino Uno it's a rocketship!

Now, let's talk about the project. Raspy-Fi OS allows for real-time streaming of Hi-Fi internet radio stations and onboard decoding of FLAC,ALAC, MP4, MP3 and .wav files at up to 192Khz at 24/32bit. The Raspy-Fi OS has a built in server that allows for remote control of playlists, DAC/ external HD and jog dial control over your LAN or WLAN from any device on your LAN with a web browser including smartphones. It's incredibly flexible in what you can do with it! The sound quality is astounding especially with a USB DAC. :drool:

The build time took a little over an hour to re-format the SDHC class 10 card and do an overclock mod to the Pi and test for stability.
This over clock involves carefully modifying a small document that controls how the memory, card read/write and processor speed behave together. There is a very slight voltage bump to get the core frequency to 1GHz. This over clock improves both the read right latency on the higher end SD cards with write speeds of +40Mb/sec and bumps the graphics and processor responsiveness noticeably. ( I am not going to get into this over clock in this post) but I will explain later on. If you do try doing this mod you do run a risk of corrupting your SD card if it's not a branded card. Branded cards (especially SanDisk) have excellent high-speed memory. The over clocking will force the card memory clock on the card to run out of normal/usual frequency and BRICK cheaper cards. My Sony 8GB SDHC card bricked up almost immediately. The new release of NOOBs V1_3_4 has an over clocker built in but it does not run in RaspyFi.

Alright now the really cool part, since the Raspy-Fi is built around Linux, iPod Classics up to generation 6 running ROXBOX can be used as an external storage device since they to are formatted in NTFS. One can of course also use a 32-64GB USB thumb drive formatted in either NTFS or FAT32 alternatively if needed for using a large HIFI collection.

I have attached several pictures regarding this build and the setup involved.

More pics coming including a new build with an external 500GB HDD with a Sirius Audio based CARAT RUBY DAC as the external sound card and head-amp.

Enjoy.

This has really been an interesting project so far!
:beer::beer::beer::beer:
 

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Wow, this is really interesting, thanks for sharing!

Please keep us updated. :)
 
Alright and now for pt2 of the micro-server project.
I have changed my HDD to a SATA2 1.5TB WD and changed the case to a
OWC (Outerworld computing) external blue-ray/optical drive. This is a drive adapter with SATA2/3, 2xFW800,FW400 and USB2.0.

I reformatted and fixed the drive and did a health check using diskinternals.com's NTFS recovery in windows. This took about 5hrs to run through. I had a few bad sectors that needed re-writing.

Now... after all the re-formatting I've got a server that is much more responsive to remote commands. Next thing to work on will be to introduce a TOS/LINK (optical & coaxial) output.

Twisted pair audio offers such a board for the Pi.

This project is still evolving and be prepared for more to come!

9129-remote-wifi-audio-controls-raspy-fi-1-1v-ipad.jpg
 

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Pretty cool. I have one of those RPi RevB computers as well :) very fun. I like that they can do almost any basic computational task (media streaming, basic server, calculation machine) as long as it runs on the ARM V7 architecture. Im currently awaiting a new case and some USB controllers to turn mine into a retro gaming console :D
 
Pretty cool. I have one of those RPi RevB computers as well :) very fun. I like that they can do almost any basic computational task (media streaming, basic server, calculation machine) as long as it runs on the ARM V7 architecture. Im currently awaiting a new case and some USB controllers to turn mine into a retro gaming console :D

Today's experiment was to try streaming some much higher bitrate ALAC at 192Khz/32bit through USB
to the CARAT RUBY II DAC. No distortions at all! Those big files sure eat bandwidth!!


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