Hello all,
I am planning to buy some old cheap router like Asus WL520GU, plug the USB audio and USB FLASH and have Internet radio/FLAC player.
My idea is to play the radio (presets are configured through terminal) but after USB stick is plugged in I want to show actual directory on some graphical LCD and control which directory is to be played with several buttons.
Can somebody point me or guide me how to program the interface between several buttons, small LCD and MPD ?
Thanks in advance
Bad choice, having only 4MB flash + 16MB RAM.
Investing $20 in a new cheap router with at leat 8/64 MB is money well spent.
See also What's your favourite cheap LEDE/OpenWrt device?
Thank you for the feedback, I will check what is available here
You're probably a lot better off with hardware that has better access to GPIO, I2C, and SPI interfaces than typical all-in-one routers. Something like a Raspberry Pi or an ARM Cortex M0+/M4 device would be what I would look at. On the latter, there are several decent boards available for US$10-15 without resorting to no-name clones.
Edit:
On re-reading your lead post, it looks like you may want to handle a wireless network connection, as well as audio-stream decompression and audio output. That's probably beyond what a typical microcontroller can handle, and probably beyond something like an ESP32 as well. Especially with various "media-center" builds available for Raspberry Pi-class devices, that would be my first choice.
They were discontinued around 10 years ago, but the SqueezeBox units were pretty impressive in their day, are available on the used market and there may still be self-hostable server software available. The "official" server software doesn't look like it's been updated since 2014. As I recall, they handled FLAC well and had significantly better DAC/audio chains that most units of that era. There looks to still be an active user community at https://forums.slimdevices.com/forumdisplay.php?20-User-Forums (and perhaps other places).
Hello all,
thank you for replies. SqueezeBox was definitely interesting piece. But 10 times pricy. I can buy something like Auna Connect 100 and just use it without any hacking as well.
But apart of "the product" I wanted to gain some new experience. I have old obsolete Mini2440 somewhere at home. But it has slow CPU and I am not sure if it is capable to decode MP3/FLAC stream. So some router with >400MHz CPU seemed to me more suitable.
You might be interested in this (quite extensive) thread in the forum archive: https://forum.archive.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=49013
The community indeed is still quite active, also because it's easy to use a Raspberry Pi as a Squeezebox (Server). The server software is open source and still maintained. I have v7.9.2-016 running on my Synology NAS and it has apps for Spotify and Youtube (I don't use these).