Orange Radio Upgrade

By PaulFinch
raspberrypi

Introduction

The Orange Radio is a project I made from an Orange Miniamp (Have a look to the Project page)

I decided to rework the project:

  1. I used Volumio for a long time, but the whole system is quite heavy and not very customizable. I noticed that I was only interested in the Spotify Connect feature, so I dumped Volumio for a (lighter) Spotify Connect daemon.

  2. I also wanted the ability to play/pause the songs, but I had just 1 button (dedicated for shutdown). So i decided to add 1 more button to afford more flexibility.

Upgrade 1: Software

At first, I used Raspotify which is great. The only problem is: It does not implement the MPRIS standard dbus interface, which could be interesting if you want to control the Spotify playback. Therefore, I switched for Spotifyd which does implement it.

You can retrieve the Spotifyd binary from the Github release page. The MPRIS feature is not included in the slim binary, so the full binary would be required. Unfortunatly, this binary is not available for armv6 (Raspberry pi Zero), slim is available but full is not.

So … you need to … compile it.

Hopefully, the documentation is pretty straight forward. It took 5-6 hours on raspberry pi zero. I tried to cross-compile it from my PC, did not work.

Once you have the binary, just create a systemd daemon for it. BUT, MPRIS needs a dbus interface, which is usually started with desktop environment. On the headless rasberry pi operating system, no session dbus is available, so I needed to create one:

I created a dbus socket unit and a dbus service to provide a session dbus. I pointed the Spotifyd service unit to this dbus address via the environment variable:

DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/var/run/dbus/my_bus_socket

I also created a dedicated python daemon (GPIO.py) to manage leds and buttons. I pointed the GPIO service unit to the dbus address.

In order to control the spotifyd playback (via MPRIS), I used the playerctl software, which points to the dbus environment variable as well.

For more details, check the Files section.

Upgrade 2: Buttons

  • BUTTON 1 : Play/Pause (GPIO17)
  • BUTTON 2 : Next Song (GPIO5) (Pressing both buttons initiates the system shutdown)

I also rewired the buttons to 3V (with resistors). When the circuit is opened, the pin is DOWN, when the circuit is closed (button pushed), the pin is HIGH.

Tip: Sometimes, you could be tempted to avoid adding resistors (like I did), just don’t.

Schematic

Code

see files here