Listening to audio and radio stations on the internet usually involves using a PC or mobile device to do so. That’s no longer the case as an engineer and audiophile named Chris (of niston cloud) designed a stand-alone Hi-Fi internet receiver component that can be connected to independent sound systems and stereos. Incredibly enough, the streamer was built around a Raspberry Pi and Pi-DAC audio card to bring 128Kbps of streaming goodness to our ears.
Chris chose Matrix Orbital’s GLK HMI series base plate in USB flavor to house the electronic components, which features a digital face (*192 X 64 pixels), 3-bicolor LEDs and a 7-key tactile keypad to navigate the menu. While the Raspberry Pi does all the math heavy lifting, the HD sound comes from the Pi-DAC add-on card from IQuadIO and features Phono connectors for easy sound system/stereo integration.
Open source firmware in C# was utilized to run on the Raspbian OS, which contains several subsystems for the audio, including the BASS audio library that provides a gap-less transition through station presets. All in all, the Nistron Stream One took 14 hours for the build, 200+ hours for software programming and close to $500 on the materials.
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