Building a FLAC box?

[chug]

Looking around nowadays, things are so cheap. When I see those boxes that'll rip your cd collection going for £500 I can't see where the cost is?

Adding it up, at retail prices.

Decent CD drive - £20
1TB HD - £40
Small VFD/TFT/LCD - £30 (touchscreen as cheap)
Rasberry Pi or similar - £40
Dac - £40

£170

An old broken cd player off ebay - £10, or a case £20-30.

The issue I guess is having a decent front end that'll run on a small screen, then giving it a remote input then making it all work together.

Looking at car computers they have various "front ends" with windows or linux running in the background. Could be an option, but'd need more power.

Anyway seen someone have a bash at this? Any ideas? Would be a lovely piece.

 

[jinjuku]

You either have time or you have money If you like tweaking and DIY'ing on the computer end then you should have fun. Does the Raspberry PI even have SATA or IDE ports? If not you won't be connecting a CD/DVD drive or Hard Disk to it.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

PI doesn't have ide/sata but still hd could be used with usb interface... PI will require you to have strong linux knowledge, especially trying to implement none-standard items like touch screen
Like Jinjuku said - it's ether money or gobbles of tech experise.
I bet something like LOGITECH UE SMART RADIO could do the trick for you without much of tinkering

 

[jinjuku]

PI doesn't have ide/sata but still hd could be used with usb interface... PI will require you to have strong linux knowledge, especially trying to implement none-standard items like touch screen
Like Jinjuku said - it's ether money or gobbles of tech experise.
I bet something like LOGITECH UE SMART RADIO could do the trick for you without much of tinkering

Sorry, I don't know why I didn't think of USB. Haven't had my 2nd cup of coffee yet.

 

[Grador]

With the pi you could run openELEC, a special built version of XBMC to be run on embedded devices. It'll happily take a USB HDD, and I assume (but have not tried) a USB cd rom drive. XBMC will rip CDs to FLAC, and can be set to do so automatically when a CD is popped in.

As for the touchscreen, I think you'd be SOL but there are plenty of other methods of control that could be used. On the DAC, you'd need to have one that accepted HDMI as openELEC for the pi does NOT support USB sound devices.

Setting up openELEC on the pi is not a very difficult task at all, but would come with the limitations I've listed. You could install linux on it but as BSA said above, it would be a challenge to get it to do everything you wanted.

 

[chug]

If I had money I'd just buy the £500 box! Got a bit of time though, trying to make use of it while I do.

Maybe the Pi isn't the best for the job, they do pico itx boards now with more i/o's and a faster spec.

Openelec sound ideal though, will look into that. Doesn't have to be a touchscreen.

What about a fullfat xbmc? can that control a vfd running a larger OS?

Thanks for the thoughts so far. Could be an interesting thing to create.

 

[Grador]

Both openelec and the full have vfd support....but it's not usable as a full control interface. You will not be able to navigate menus using it, more just seen pertinent information such as what's currently playing. If you want to run the system headless there's a wide suite of smartphone/tablet applications that can control it. There is also a web interface that you can access from the browser of another system, but it doesn't work nearly as well as the smartphone apps.

Edit: Took something for grated here that I should not have, any of the control schemes I just mentioned would require networking. The pi has built in wired, but adding wireless would obviously cost a few bucks (doable, mine is wireless at the moment). The Pi's networking leaves a little to be desired, the wireless has constant dropouts (~2 seconds every min or so). These dropouts do not effect music playback over the network (they buffer enough), but are a touch obnoxious for controlling.