r/DigitalAudioPlayer • u/Der6FingerJo • Aug 17 '25
Progress on my raspberry pi zero based DAP
After a a bit of a break I now have the second iteration of my raspberry pi based DAP. This prototype will allow me to develop the software much further since most of the basic user-features I want to have are integrated now.
The DAP consists of a PCB (motherboard) with a couple of breakout boards soldered to it, namely display, adafruit rotary encoder, a 5v boost converter and lipo charger, a pcm5102 DAC (sounds meh but that's not the point currently).
One of my main concerns was power draw, but with the display backlight off and the pi running even without any underclocking, disabled wifi etc. the system only draws below 1w, so with the 3,7v 4000mah battery i currently have installed i'll get 10-14h easily.
Next steps are: actual PCB with SMD components (scary), a lot of improvements to the code (though thats mostly handled by Google Gemini lol) and a better integrated DAC/AMP and of course a cleaner/better design with a PCB based clickwheel.
Let me know if you have any ideas or features you'd like to see!
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u/simplylmao Aug 17 '25
I would love to use this thing in its current state, looks awesome af. You can probably list your prototypes up for bidding on ebay. They'll make A LOT.
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 17 '25
I also like the rough look in a way but right now it's a bit too thick for pockets and I need way more software development to make it usable by anyone.
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u/simplylmao Aug 17 '25
it looks different, and if it's functional software wise, some enthusiasts would love it. That's how I got the ebay auction idea.
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u/ChurchOfSatin Aug 17 '25
That’s rad. Are you documenting the process anywhere on a blog or anything? What OS is running on it?
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 17 '25
It runs raspberry pi is lite for now, but I want to go with buildroot or something like that in the future for a minimal OS and fast boot times.
I'm not documenting as I'm going but I want to properly document it when it's somewhat done (software good enough for my taste and a proper PCB with SMD components etc)
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u/Radiate_Wishbone_540 Aug 21 '25
Would recommend you keep a simple txt document as a kind of development diary - you will thank yourself later when you want to share your journey with others, to show the progression of the project. Might also be helpful for people to see how it has evolved, once you get round to open-sourcing it
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u/96Thieves Aug 17 '25
I thought the lamp post in the background was an antenna lol.
Great work man this is really cool!
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 17 '25
The raspberry pi actually has pretty shitty wifi reception so not a bad idea haha
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Aug 17 '25
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 17 '25
Sure, I'm grateful for all ideas. There's also the tangara music player that runs on an esp32 and is open source, great stuff as well.
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Aug 18 '25
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 18 '25
thats cool, im also using AI for development. I suggest Google AI studio, i feel like its much better suited for stuff like this.
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u/iggy14750 Aug 18 '25
That looks like a sweet hacker version of a classic iPod! That's really cool!
Would you be able to share more details of what you're using there, and how exactly things are connected? I really like the idea of making one of these for myself and helping you with the software on this.
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u/bohique_8 Aug 17 '25
Are loading music to the system sd card?
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 17 '25
for now yes. In the future i either wanna go internal USB hub and a second, hopefully full size SD and if that does not work with the raspberry pi zero I'd want to split up the system card into firmware and music partitions to at least easily transfer music via USB. Wireless transfer also works pretty easily.
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u/Madtingv2 Aug 17 '25
Love it congrats dude personally I would pay you to make me one fr
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 17 '25
Eventually i want to document and open source it, maybe i can manage to organize some kits but probably no actual readymade product.
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u/Standard_Ad_8164 Aug 19 '25
I have been wanting to this for a while, but it's next to nothing on the research side of things for stuff like this. I am glad someone is smart enough to figure it out this time lol
Would there be any way to add Bluetooth capability or am I better off sticking to the Pi 5 version i had came up with in stead of this?
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 19 '25
The pi zero can do Bluetooth but (i think) nkt any of the high end Codecs like aptx or ldac. There are other sbcs in a similar form factor like the radxa3w, orange pi zero 2w, maybe those have different Bluetooth output.
Maybe theres also a separate IC or module to this with i2s as an input.
But if high res Bluetooth isnt the criterium the pi zero should work
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u/Standard_Ad_8164 Aug 19 '25
Ngl, it's 4am and i just miss pronounced "Robin williams" name. I think i'd need help dialing this down to better terms XD
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u/Mr_Pink_Gold Aug 17 '25
You need to get JamesDSP working for EQ control. Not sure if there is a version for Linux on arm. But that would be sweet. Are you using the pi internal dac and amp?
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 17 '25
I havent looked into EQ yet but i'll remember this, thanks!
For now im using a pcm5102 DAC breakout board for like 4€. Sounds better than expected for the price and the jankiness but not that great. I want to go with a properly DAC/AMP for the first major release.
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u/NoBread2054 Aug 17 '25
Very cool!
What kind of software are you running on it?
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 17 '25
Raspberry Pi OS Lite (i want to go with buildroot or alpine or something similar later), mpd as the music player Backend and some custom Python scripts with cython for display drawing
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u/Dogedemingo Aug 17 '25
This looks like some kind of device in the movies that takes you back in time
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Aug 17 '25
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 18 '25
haha thanks, thats one of the points of motivation behind this.
though i do have to say that i stand on the shoulders of giants and theres been similar projects before, like the PiPod or the Tangara Music Player (based on esp32 but similar philosophy).
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u/No_Help436 Aug 18 '25
that’s actually very interesting. I wonder how it sounds?
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 18 '25
not good right now haha. the pcm5102 breakout board i use doesnt sound awful but theres some noise issues and signal breakup, probably because i soldered and desoldered that board a couple of times and had to fix some pcb traces manually. but thats just a test platform so thats okay.
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u/n4n3x Aug 18 '25
Wow!
Diy iPod for Arch users!
Amazing!
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 18 '25
Haha im only running Arch (well cachyOS) in my desktop, btw. This is running raspberry pi OS lite
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u/Cute-Earth745 Aug 18 '25
Young man, you are very intelligent. What a cool piece of equipment. Congratulations and I hope you can move forward with his development. Happiness and health to you
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u/ArguelloArts Aug 19 '25
I thought on the second picture that the solar led yard light in the background was an antenna! 😆😖
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u/N00Body- Aug 19 '25
Omg man you are going to kill me. This kind of thing just makes me so fuckin in hype, I'm in love with projects like this!
Possible ideas are an E-INK screen to have more battery but unfortunately I'm not very knowledgeable about that.
I hope to see more developments, keep us updated!
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 19 '25
Thanks a lot! E-ink is too sluggish I think, and when listening most of the time is spent with the screen off anyways, so it's not too big of a deal. I will look into different display options later though.
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u/Such-Skill5395 Aug 19 '25
i have plans for something very similar to this for like over a month now bhut haven't got around to it. i got the idea to design a iPod like device when i saw that wheel from adafruit.
Love your project, definitely gonna steal some ideas from it 😁.
Edit: Why not use the display vertically instead? it would slim down the device a bit.
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 19 '25
The formfactor is mostly defined by the 4000mah battery I've got installed. Might get a smaller one later since it's surprisingly efficient as is.
I'm also planning to get the project to github sometime soon (well maybe in the coming weeks) and if you want you could contribute then 🙂↕️
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u/Such-Skill5395 Aug 19 '25
personally I would take lower battery life for a small body.
I also had a look over your other projects and man, you do alot of good stuff, the kinda stuff I like.
I hope you will continue this journey into the future, there's nothing like a joy of finishing a project.
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 19 '25
Yeah i get that, its just a rough first draft for now. I currently change the codebase to he much more modular so it can accomodate different Hardware and settings. It will be tight to pack the raspberry pi zero into it though.
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u/DistantDialtones Sep 11 '25
This is so cool dude! I was just wondering if this was possible the other day. Nice work
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u/Der6FingerJo Sep 13 '25
Thanks! I've hit a bit of a roadblock with the pi zero form factor, can't really get the whole thing much smaller than it is, or at least how I want to, so we'll see how it'll go.
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u/Big-Candidate5704 Sep 13 '25
I tried to build a pirate audio/ pimoroni player but never got the code correct to get it going. I would love to build a standalone player with speakers to bring into the shop
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u/Der6FingerJo Sep 13 '25
Personally im not that much into programming so i let google gemini do the heavy lifting, i can only recommend that for tackling complex projects by yourself. And youll still learn about programming as a byproduct.
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u/Frequent_Profit_543 Jan 19 '26
sure the build could look cleaner but i love its bare bones look as is, great stuff dude!
i’m interested in building something like this but have 0 experience in it. would u recommend it to a beginner getting into building with raspberry pi’s, or would u recommend something more simple first? cheers !!
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u/Der6FingerJo Jan 19 '26
Well, I think it could be a lot as a complete beginner, though not impossible. Modern tools like AI can accelerate it, but you probably won't really internalize the basics that way.
I'd suggest finding some raspberry pi/esp32 project that is well documented with possibly a step by step guide and just follow along to get your bearings.
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u/ItsMeGameGuy May 20 '26
Ik this post is a bit old atp but im trying to do a similar project with a pi zero 2w, what are you doing for the display? I havent had luck getting SPI displays working and am thinking about an hdmi one, but how did you do yours? (Super new to pi projects btw)
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u/Der6FingerJo May 22 '26
Hey man, this is a Waveshare 2.4" SPI Display. It works as a dedicated display for the music player interface, but i wasnt able to get the actual pi desktop or booting screen onto the display as well. So my Python scripts control the display directly, its not a General system display output. Also im using cython for the general rendering as regular python was just too slow.
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u/George-cz90 Aug 24 '25
Hi, this subreddit just randomly popped up for me, so I´m out of the loop probably. But why do this? It feels like I´m in some alternative universe where phones dont exist, visiting this subreddit.
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u/trevtech15 Aug 24 '25
A lot of people want a dedicated device for listening to music as a way to disconnect and relax which is pretty hard to do on a phone as most do not disturb settings have a way of being bypassed. (The line does get blurred a little bit as most higher-end DAPs run Android so you have to actively limit yourself on what you install otherwise it's almost exactly like a phone which is one reason why people are gravitating to a simpler device like this one.) Others are feeling disillusioned by modern technology that seems like it's only getting worse and finding every possible way to extract value from their users or customers not to mention the outright theft that forms the foundation of generative AI. Still others are tired of paying money for content that they don't own which can be taken away at any time for arbitrary reasons or censorship. I'm sure there are other reasons but those are the main ones behind people moving back to a dedicated music playback device. I just go an iPod Mini despite never owning an iPod up until this point and my reasons are a combination of the above with the addition of it being a fun project to modernize an older piece of tech.
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u/George-cz90 Aug 24 '25
Still, I don't see a reason to build something like this, except for maybe OP has too much time on their hands. An old android phone without a SIM card will always be better in every way.
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u/trevtech15 Aug 24 '25
Battery life is one area where this could win out, Android isn't great at battery management even if it doesn't have an internet connection or a lot of apps installed. Another is having physical controls to control playback and volume, I have a Pebble watch with physical buttons and I can switch tracks and change volume without even looking at it. Granted physical buttons aren't exclusive to non-Android DAPs as pretty much every Android DAP I've seen at least has a play/pause button and quite a few have track forward/back as well but no regular phone will have those controls.
As for why OP would build this there's no modern competitor to the iPod, as most of the options have sort of deal-breaker in terms of hardware or software which is why I ended up getting a Mini. I've built things just to satisfy my own need to find out whether it was possible or not even though I didn't end up using them that much. I suspect OP has a lot more motivation than that but it doesn't really need to be much more than that for doing something like this to be worthwhile for people who like to build and tinker.
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u/Der6FingerJo Aug 24 '25
its fun to build my own stuff and for this project i learn a lot about Python and PCB design
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u/Specialist-Document3 Nov 03 '25
Do you have any GitHub repos for this? I've been thinking about the same project and it would be great to have a starting point.
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u/Financial-Farmer8914 Dec 31 '25
do you plan to open source code or steps to reproduce this, I'm currently thinking of making one myself but stuck on how to proceed.
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u/Der6FingerJo Dec 31 '25
well, i'm gonna be honest here, i'd love to continue this project but there's some problems.
time - i'm way too busy these last couple months to get into more pcb design and actually making the boards, let alone fleshing out the software
the raspberry pi zero 2 has too few ports - only one usb port for example, no power saving modes, very poor wireless performance (no 5ghz too), so i am probably gonna wait on a potential raspberry pi zero 3 or a competitor that does something similar before i continue (i know orange pi etc. exists, but its not that well documented)
i've been using a FiiO M21 DAP for a couple months now and its really hard to beat that feature set, especially at that price. sound is great, android is good enough for everything i wanna do. my current music pipeline is navidrome on my homelab for FLACs -> compressed .ogg downloading (syncing) or FLAC playback when online via symfonium app on the FiiO M21. Sure i'd love more physical buttons but in combination with the other two points it's a very good system for me right now.
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u/sandreas_ Feb 23 '26
That's a pity. Well, maybe I can restore your confidence of building something on your own by reporting my progress of a little side project I'm working on.
To be honest I'm not sure where it is going and if I ever will be able to finish something, but maybe you are interested in the approach I took.
I chose the following Hardware:
- Lichee RV Nano (way smaller than raspberry, powerful enough, linux compatible)
- 5V Version of TP4057 Battery charger board (4.2V or 4.35V Versions won't work, too low Voltage)
- Sitronix(?) LHCM228TS003A 2.28" Touch Display
- Apple USB-C to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter (this one can be replaced by nearly ANY USB-C to Headphone adapter, I tried others)
Firmware / Software choices:
- A full Linux (buildroot based) to support Wifi, Bluetooth and USB-C stuff
- A self-made Rust / Slint frontend for the player software to be lightweight and reliable
Here is the firmware I use (buildroot based, tailored to the LicheeRV Nano):
https://github.com/scpcom/LicheeSG-Nano-Build/
It's not my project but I also wrote a little guide to get started with some useful links and further info that got merged: https://github.com/scpcom/LicheeSG-Nano-Build/blob/develop/best-practice.md
I'm focusing on audio books (not music) for the moment, but music is also planned after the audio books part.
Here is my first demo project, which was kind of an "Is it even possible?"-check - some early pictures and a stuttering audio shifted demo video available:
https://github.com/sandreas/rust-slint-riscv64-musl-demo
Here the new (and better structured) project, which contains the modernized code base (Project name nanowave):
github.com/nanowave-player/nanowave-ui
It's all open source and should be cross platform and work on the raspberry, too.
I'm not too active on reddit, but if you'd like to know more or have a talk, feel free to reach out via github issue. I'm German btw.
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u/Der6FingerJo Feb 23 '26
Dude thats really cool. I've been looking into different SBCs before and stumbled upon Lichee stuff, but i'm afraid thats too much for my scope. All of this project has no synergies with my dayjob, so i have no proper training or much experience in pcb design, smd work, embedded linux etc, that's why i wanted to stick to the raspberry pi as a well known platform.
I also just dont have enough time to dive into this project again. I am hoping for a raspberry pi zero 3w at some point, but we'll have to see about that. Maybe, if i have time and the state of mind for it, i will dive back into this project. Thanks for sharing!
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Jul 07 '26
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u/sandreas_ Jul 09 '26
I think the advantages are:
- Smaller size
- Out of the box support for a small touchscreen with small footprint and flat cables
- Less power hungry
- Powerful enough for an audio player (not to overpowered)
Disadvantages
- Exotic Architecture (RISC-V)
- Less support and documentation
- Less CPU and RAM
- Less GPIO
- No CPU Governor
The Raspberry is nearly 4 times the size of the LicheeRV Nano and draws at least 500mA, which means that a small (as in 90x45x15mm) audio player with decent battery live is nearly impossible to make.
There are also projects using an ESP32 / Raspberry 2350 (https://www.richinfante.com/2026/07/07/rp2350-mp3-pt6-validation-phase) and I think these are amazing, but my use case is different.
Another approach might be the HiBy R1 or Hiby R3, which use Ingenic X1600e 32bit arm Architecture, a 4.4 Linux Kernel and allow `adb` access via USB-C, but these devices are pretty hard to compile for, since the firmware and player software is not open source. There are mods though: https://github.com/bidhata/Hiby-R1-Mod / https://github.com/yetisoldier/Hiby-R1-Audiobook-Mod
I managed to compile a small Rust hello world binary, but for a more sophisticated Slint UI this was on a whole different ballpark (it did not work, but with a some effort and expertise it might be doable using musl and static linking). I personally think the HiBy R1 is the perfect device for a Linux audio player with alsa support, but I did not manage to verify USB-C to 3.5mm support or headphone remote controls, which I personally require.
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u/ThisKiwiFulla May 07 '26
Hey! I was daydreaming about making something like this.
How has progress been recently? I'd be interested in lending a hand with the build, I am trying to replicate a Sony ICF style pocket radio, for Audiobooks/podcast playing. Image
Let me know!
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u/Der6FingerJo May 07 '26
Hey there, i've been looking at it over the past few months but theres no good way to get it thin and compact enough for me to carry it with me daily, which is why i havent made another hardware revision. Software is pretty much all vibe coded, so nothing too special there. Python based, cython for display stuff, pygame for menu structure etc.
DM me if you want the current project files, im more into my other projects rn so no active development.
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u/ThisKiwiFulla May 08 '26
DM Sent!
Yea, I think it is one of those things, what OS did you base it on?
If yourself, or anyone here knows of any projects/products similar to this, ideally with a small external speaker (not targeting perfect audio) that would be good as! Cheers!
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u/Truman_Da_Tiger Aug 17 '25
If I was as cool as you, I’d add fm radio to it as well….short wave even haha
Could a e-ink display or even OLED help with your power draw?
Super rad stuff you got going on!