rowlandhills wrote:One question comes to mind:
- With the "Control link" interface via toslink cables, is there any reason why it wouldn't be possible to build a breakout control box which could take an ethernet connection, allowing control of volume and sources through Kinsky or other UPnP control points? Alternatively, could RS232 be supported this way?
I know that building ethernet (or RS-232) control in was rejected fairly early on due to impact on musicality, but it would be a real step down for me in usability of the system (particularly for the rest of my family) if we couldn't still control things using Kinsky.
I was thinking about this a little more today, and I had an idea which might be worth you considering. As the "control link" optical lead removes electrical interference, perhaps this could be an instance where you could save some effort on circuit design, as there's no need to optimise. One possibility could be to simply put a Raspberry Pi minicomputer in a box together with your customised "Toslink sender", connected through the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi. This might even fit in a Gaio/Kikkin type enclosure, rather than a Tundra/Sagatun one.lejonklou wrote:rowlandhills: Yes, I think this is possible. There was a guy emailing me the other day, who was interested in trying it. I'll think some more about it after my vacation.
There is already open source software for the Raspberry Pi (https://github.com/PeteManchester/MediaPlayer) which allows it to emulate many of the functions of a DS including volume control and handling multiple sources (Radio, Playlist, Songcast) so I suspect that a competent programmer could take some of this and use it to develop something which shows up on the network as a preamp with several sources and volume control, but where the selection of that puts out commands over GPIO which can be sent down to the Sagatun(s).
Worth considering, anyway...
One other thought I had was to ask you whether the control link sends "+1" and "-1" type commands for volume and source, or absolute "Volume 68", "Volume 67", "Source 2" type commands. This could impact the ability to handle external controls.
Finally, it may be a requirement to have both "Master" and "Slave" connections for the control link on such a box and connected, as it would act as Master when receiving commands over the network, but would also need to be able to report the correct source/volume when queried over the network after commands had been manually entered on the Sagatun itself.
