WORK IN PROGRESS

For Christmas 2019 I built my kids a Phoniebox after a friend told me how much fun he had.

These are some notes for me to remember how I built it.

What I wanted

For my kids I wanted to use RFID cards. In addition the box should have buttons for Play/Pause, FF, Rwd, Volume up and Volume down.

I wanted the box portable, so I needed a power bank.

My friend has built a excellent custom-made case which fulfills my needs.

case

That blog post (in German) provided lots of information and I used especially the On/Off description. Thanks for providing that info!

Hardware

I used the following hardware:

  • Raspberry Pi 3 (doesn’t need an active cooling)
  • Ravpower ??? Powerbank
  • Neuftech RFID reader
  • USB sound card
  • 5W Amplifier
  • OnOffShim
  • Arcade buttons
  • Power button
  • …

Building

I connected and soldered everything first, before I assembled the complete box to make sure everything works.

Wiring Sketch: sketch

Software installation

Software installation first, so everything can be tested.

  1. Download latest Raspian Lite image
  2. Install Raspberry Pi with BalenaEtcher
  3. Preconfigure WiFI in image, see here
  4. Rename to phoniebox with sudo nano /etc/hostname
  5. Login with ssh (default user name: pi, default password: raspberry)

  6. Install Phoniebox software (for Raspian Buster)

    1. Use this one line command: cd; rm buster-install-*; wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID/master/scripts/installscripts/buster-install-default.sh; chmod +x buster-install-default.sh; ./buster-install-default.sh

    2. See also here for details.

    3. I use the Classic version as I don’t use Spotify and it’s supposed to be faster.

  7. I configured the sound according to this description.
  8. To use the buttons I configured the GPIO settings according to this manual, but without the shutdown, because I use the OnOffShim (see later steps). In the file scripts/gpio-buttons.py the pins can be configured and (de)activated. I don‘t use recording although the case and the hardware supports it.

  9. Install OnOffShim software

    1. Use this one line command: curl https://get.pimoroni.com/onoffshim | bash

    2. Set daemon_active=1, led_pin=25 and hold_time=1 in file /etc/cleanshutd.conf

    3. Make sure the original Phoniebox shutdown script is used: Open sudo nano /usr/bin/cleanshutd and replace shutdown -h +$shutdown_delay with /home/pi/RPi-Jukebox-RFID/scripts/playout_controls.sh -c=shutdown. Be aware that shutdown_delay has no effect anymore.

  10. Reboot with sudo reboot.

Gotchas, lessons learned, etc.

  • It’s really important to solder as good as possible (I’m not very good though). If you have cold solder joints it may or may not work, which can be really annoying.
  • Connecting everything together first to test it is really helpful, because you don’t want to assemble everything together in a (tiny) case and then something doesn’t work.
  • It really helps to sketch the wiring on a piece of paper, so you can fix possible issues or misconnections much faster.

to be continued