I snagged an enclosure with a little adapter for a SATA m.2 drive. It’s amazing!

OMV is quite limiting and maybe a little heavy for the pi(?)

Docker is straightforward Idk what to say You install docker and docker compose on host and run some compose.yml’s to spin up your services

I don’t think I followed a specific guide. I’m using the HifiBerry Amp2 amplifier with the Pis. The house I moved into had Bose in-wall speakers in a couple of rooms and I added some in-ceiling speakers and a couple of outdoor speakers. Most of the speaker wires are routed down to the basement, so I can have all the Pis connected right to the switch via Ethernet.

Running speaker cable is by far the hardest thing about this. You could also connect the Pis via Wi-fi; I haven’t tried that but it is supposed to work pretty well.

On the software end, it’s pretty simple. PiCorePlayer is just an image you burn to an SD card and boot up on the Pis. I run LMS in a docker container. As long as the PiCorePlayer instances and LMS are all on the same subnet, they will auto-discover each other. If they’re not, it’s just a matter of configuring the LMS server URL on the PiCorePlayers.

LMS configuration is also pretty simple… you point it at your music folder and it will scan and index your MP3s and other audio files. It has plugins for Spotify, Tidal, Youtube, and some other apps. You can control it via browser, or there are Android and iOS mobile apps.

Once you buy the Pis, amps, power supplies, and cases, you are looking at probably $140 or so per zone… so it’s not entirely cheap, but I think it’s cheaper than Sonos or other pre-built systems. It sounds great and the different Pis sync very well. I don’t hear any sync issues walking from zone to zone.

It actually turned out to be easier than I thought.

The infrared reader (arduino code) is based on

https://github.com/Arduino-IRremote/Arduino-IRremote

The code running on my raspberry pi was written in Java using spring boot which is probably overkill but I am more comfortable with java than python so I used

https://github.com/Fazecast/jSerialComm

to read data from the pi’s usb port and just sent instructions to the unified remote server which does most of the heavy lifting. I used

https://github.com/openhab/openhab-addons/blob/main/bundles/org.openhab.binding.unifiedremote/src/main/java/org/openhab/binding/unifiedremote/internal/UnifiedRemoteConnection.java

as a reference along with some verbose logging on the unified remote server to see what codes needed to be sent over the rest api.

Happy to help you along if you want to give this a go :)

A mate did that bit - CM108 I think.

lol - great question. I was very excited at the start and did things like talk to a guy in Spain with 5W and a long bit of wire out in the bush, talked to people 400 km away by pointing a handheld antenna directly at a satellite as it passed overhead, received images directly from the amateur station on the ISS, met a heap of smart old guys who were doing interesting things with radio - designing antennas, setting up repeater networks etc. I went in a couple of competitions (in ham radio this is usually about how many contacts you can make over a time period). But ultimately, it turns out I like interesting technical problems, learning things, and buying stuff I don’t need off the internet - more than chatting to people I don’t know. So now I’m more into Linux and self-hosting which scratches a lot of those same itches.

I still have a short range radio in the car and a couple of handheld radios. With these I can key into that Raspberry Pi, have the audio travel over the internet and pop out anywhere in the world there’s another AllStar point and go over the air to radios there, but I’ve sold all my HF gear (that allows you to talk direct to anywhere without infrastructure).

It is an interesting, and quite diverse hobby, and there’s a lot of cheap Chinese radios, and a bottom tier license in most countries that’s easy to obtain (for example without learning Morse code). I’d recommend it to people interested in tech stuff. It’s a hobby that might not exist in 50 years - a lot of the radio spectrum allocated to ham radio in the old days was considered worthless, but now governments regard that as a valuable public asset that can be sold to telecommunication companies. Also there’s growing interference from digital gadgets and wireless devices that requires innovative solutions to overcome.