HiFiPi

A little 3D printed frame for a Raspberry Pi 5 based HiFi system

Description

A self-contained unit capable of playing High Fidelity audio

Design Requirements

• The device should be one integrated unit, not a bunch of loose components (except for possibly the DAC, see below)
• Easy to tinker with
• Touch screen
• knowbs, buttons, switches, LEDs, etc.
• The device should be modular

Bill Of Materials

All components locally sourced in NL, from either TinyTronics or Kiwi Electronics or Amazon

Single Board Computer

• Any Raspberry Pi 5, although the 2GB version is NOT recommended
• An active cooler
• A power supply

Storage

Basic

• Any SD card of 32GB or more

Advanced (recommended)

• An NVMe SSD (500GB or more)
• A PCIe to NVMe HAT, either top or bottom mounted (I chose top for easy accessibility)

Display

Here the possibilities are endless, I would recommend at least a 7" display with capacitive touch. Make sure that it has mounts for the Raspberry Pi. I ended up getting this one from Amazon

Audio

This another of those "whatever floats your boat" options thing, here you will find a whole range of DACs, with prices starting at €24.- going al the way to €220.-

Another option is an external DAC, with an even more bewildering price range. Here you can find a good assortment. A good source for DAC reviews can be found here

Software

There are three main dedicated HiFi contenders, see here for a comparison

• I am currently using Volumio, which has an active and very friendly community. One disadvantage is that you need a premium subscription to unlock all the extra bells and whistles
• Moode is a good alternative (actually a fork of the original Volumio)
• piCorePlayer is also an excellent option, although the initial setup is less intuitive than the others
• Hifiberry-os is another interesting one, especially for Hifiberry DAC owners
• As the Pi5 is a pretty capable little computer, you could also install Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu or any other ARM64 OS and go from there
• Last but not least, LibreElec (a dedicated KODI distro) is very capable and adds some interesting video streaming options and other bells and whistels through its extensive Add-on ecosystem

Miscellanea

• The buttons are recycled MX keys

• TinyTronics has a nice rotary encoder

• They also have a nice selection of small 1.3"128x64 I2C OLED displays

• You will probably need a variety of spacers, flat cables and screws, these are readily available at either Amazon or Tinytronics