Evan Hailey's Spotify Box Eschews a Raspberry Pi in Favor of a Fully Custom, Compact SBC
Built around an older but low-cost and fully-featured Allwinner chip, this clever box acts as a middleman for Spotify streaming.
Electronics and robotics student Evan Hailey has built a dedicated music playback device with a difference: Instead of throwing a Raspberry Pi at the problem and calling it done, the Spotify Box houses a custom-built single-board computer.
"The Spotify Box acts as a middleman between the official Spotify app and a new or existing home audio system — allowing you to connect your smart phone to your audio setup and stream music throughout your house," Hailey explains of the project.
In that, the Spotify Box is hardly unique. What makes it stand out is that it's entirely home-made, down to the single-board computer (SBC) which hides in the attractive oiled wood chassis.
Hailey's custom SBC is built around the Allwinner V3S, an Arm Cortex-A7 chip with 64MB of DDR2 SRAM — old, to be sure, but powerful enough for the project at hand. Enough of the chip's features are broken out to offer SD Card storage for a Linux operating system, SDIO to a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth transceiver, wired Ethernet, a physical push-button to trigger pairing, an addressable RGB LED for status, and the RCA jacks which connect it to the audio system.
"I’ve been pretty partial to the V3S as far as its integrated features, but this chip has one flaw that has almost ruined my life," Hailey notes. "The 128-pin QFP is tough to solder; In fact this is absolutely the most difficult package that I have dealt with ever."
That wasn't the only challenge encountered, either: Hailey found that the 64MB of memory was right on the edge of usable, with a lack of space causing page allocation failures — resolved by freeing up some memory by disabling a few features, a process which Hailey describes as "rather ugly and [which] involved a few compromises."
Finally, the custom computer was installed in a housing — initially 3D printed, sanded, and painted for a more polished look, but finally a CNC-milled piece of walnut treated with tung oil for "much more depth and a warm matte appearance.
"The process of creating the Spotify Box taught me a lot," Hailey concluded. "I spent hundreds of hours learning about Linux, debugging, writing software, and designing the form and function of this device. I am both relieved and reluctant about leaving this project. There will likely be a real second revision — utilizing a different microprocessor and external DRAM —sometime in the future, but for the next few months I’ll probably take a break from this project."
The full write-up is now available on Hailey's blog.