I have been looking for a cheap wifi audio streaming solution that I can play independently in different rooms of the house. I looked at Sonos but the price tag was way out of my budget, so what else was there? My friend from work told me about Logitech’s SqueezeBox players and it was hard to make one for myself for less than $100.
What You Need.
- Raspberry Pi Model A or B.
- SD Memory Card (4gb storage)
- Nano Wifi Dongle
- 5v Power Supply (spare mobile phone charger with micro usb)
- 3.5mm audio jack to hookup to a pair of speakers.
- Stereo Speakers (Amplified)
Speaker Enclosure
During the end of year sale I found K-Mart selling the iPhone/iPod speaker dock for $15 and the sound quality wasn’t that bad. So what I planned to do is enclose the Raspberry Pi inside this speaker dock.
The other reason I bought this speaker dock is that it runs on 5 volts 1000mA of power and it’s just perfect for powering the Raspberry Pi.
Time To Do Some Modding!
Time to mod the speaker dock, after I have unscrew the dock the top part of the case has two partitions which is taking up the space and there is no room the lay my Raspberry Pi inside so I took out my mini rotary kit and cut away the two partitions.
The next thing I had to do was to figure out where to run the power from the internal PCB. Then I had build a small USB interface to run the power to the Raspberry Pi. I soldered 5V+ to pin 1 and GND to pin 4 of the USB female socket.
For audio I had to buy a 3.5mm Audio Jack and solder the left and right audio wires directly to the audio circuit on the PCB.
For network connection I bought a cheap nano wifi usb dongle online for around $10, but before you go and buy one go and check out the wifi dongle compatibility list first.
Installing The Software
Before your squeezebox player can work your Raspberry Pi needs to run PiCore Player Operating System on a SD memory card, I recommend a minimum 4gb. You can download the latest image from here and follow the setup instructions here.
Before you can stream audio to your RaspBerry Pi you need to download and install the Logitech Media Server from here. For me what I have done is I have built a NAS server where all my media are stored and this is where I have installed my Logitech Media Server. To access the Logitech Media Server Web UI enter your server’s IP address and follow by the default port of 9000. eg http://192.168.1.1:9000.
From the Web UI you can control all of your squeezebox players, and if you have and iPhone or Android device you can download the app and control your players from anywhere in the house.