Raspberry π

Can't answer your questions but I've got a phatdac you can have for a small forum donation. Got it from @Colm89.

I'm getting mine from https://thepihut.com/ …just dithering over what keyboard/mouse to get. The zero seems to need more accessories than I thought (MiniHDMI adapter, MicroUSB adapter, etc.).

Can't really help on the wired audio - BT or wi-fi seem like the obvious routes as there's only a Mini HDMI and OTG USB. Could always use a HDMI>Audio splitter thing.

As @Stonehedge said, phatdac the easiest way to get good (unamplified) audio from a pi. I had a pizero with phatdac running volumio for streaming, into powered bookshelf speakers for a few months and it worked great.

I only changed to using a chromecast audio as it integrated nicely with my Google home mini and homeassistant. I don't even use that now either though...

Cheers @stonehedge I'd be interested in that. Does it require soldering do you know? I have a feeling my soldering iron is buried in a box in my MIL's garage somewhere.

I'd be planning on running it headless so don't need much in the way of accessories (and I'm pretty sure I've got most of them lying around somewhere). It's to plug into a hifi so BT/WiFi is out.

Now I think about it I do have an unused Chromecast audio somewhere. Absolutely no idea where though.

Nah, just pops on. Will get it in the post
to you tomorrow.

It pops on to the GPIO header on a full size Pi, but if @aggi has a Zero, that will need a GPIO header soldered on I think?

Good point. I forgot that they don't come pre soldered.

I might have a spare pi zero w with soldered header if @aggi wants it for a forum donation too.

One thing I will say though, and I'll choose my words very carefully out of respect for the very generous and nice previous owner, the header has been soldered on in the artisan impressionist style. Works fine though! :D

@aggi - I'm just getting one with the headers pre soldered from the pihut as I'm going to put a mini display on (whenever it arrives from China). The cost difference is pretty small and removes the risk/hassle.

Ha ha ha!

I really regret saying that. If somebody criticised my soldering I'd be devastated! It's really not bad, I was just being a dick!

Haha don't worry, I'm more comfortable with hand tools than something that needs finesse like soldering

Sounds great, I'm happy to bump up the forum donation for that. I'm sure that the artisan soldering will be better than my ham-fisted efforts.

I had a play with Volumio on a Pi last night and it seems nice, although with some things that didn't quite work as I wanted. Anyone got any suggestions for other software to look at? Rune is on the list, anything else?

Can you PM me you address? Will get in post today.

First thing I've received for a while that I've been excited by.

Although I was surprised that the mini USB to normal USB on the keyboard means the mini USB is male and plugs into the keyboard, so you still need an adapter.

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Just to let you know your old Pi is doing sterling work as a RetroPi games console. Many hours of Dr Mario have been played.

Thanks again.

Epic. Glad it's being put to good use.

The soldering looks pretty good to me.

I've got to solder the headers onto two Ttgo LORA esp32 boards today.

Ttgo are about as cheap as you can get. Last time I soldered one all of the contacts peeled off. To do it right you need to heat for the absolute minimum time but not too short because if you undercook it you'll just have to reheat and probably peel the copper off that way.

My criticism of @Colm89 's soldering is probably coming back to bite me today.

What fun stuff are you doing with LORA?

Two things.

1) Helping a teacher friend write some guides for his kids to build a lorawan network of various environmental sensors at their school.

2) Building a few prototypes for a glaciologist friend who is looking to cut the cost and increase the battery life and reliability of his currently WiFi enabled sensors that tend to die after one winter.

That's very cool. I've been looking for an excuse to play with LORA and the best I can come up with is sensors for my mum's bee hives. Not that I've made any attempt to get started yet.

My daughter did a prototype "loudness sensor" lorawan device for A level. We libe in Amsterdam where aeroplane noise is quite a thing. The idea was to show that a dense, real-time, noise map would be possible in the city. I thought it was a really interesting idea.

How far did she get? That sounds like a great idea!

It was for her "Global Perspectives" A level and it did indeed seem a really good idea. It was actually more about the motivation, viability and thought processes than the technology, but she got together some prototypes. She used the Seeeduino Lorawan board and a Grove loudness sensor to measure and push those measurements out via "TheThingsNetwork" to an AWS (or possibly google compute) instance with elasticstack running on in to graph the noise values.

She mocked up some geographic demos which showed what the finished idea might look like and showed how cheaply you could actually build the thing if you were motivated

Things that she didn't tackle and which seemed difficult were things like calibrating the senors such taht measurements from one were comparable to measurements from another, and also deciding what exactly was being measured, did she just want low frequency engine type noise? or something else.

I thought it was strong piece of work, and actually a really useful one in Amsterdam, where the flight paths from Schiphol are really variable. It can make parts of the city (I'm looking at you Amsterdam Bos) beautiful or horrible depending on where the planes are.

Was also really good for changing the 'ownership' of the data. Noise studies tend to be done by the people making the noise, not the people suffering from it.

Those modules you mentioned, they have LoRa & wifi on the one module? What's the use case for that? If it's to be used as gateway then wouldn't you rather a wired connection?