Endpoint on RaspPi 3 with Touchscreen?

Hi everybody,
I have a question about The RPi with a standard touchscreen:
I have built that device into a self made headphone amp to control Roon without the need for an iPad or such device.

Its running Ropieee and I use a stripped down iFi Zen DAC connected to USB of the Rpi which feeds the tube-amp.
This thing runs flawlessly and I enjoy it a lot, but sometimes I wished there was a complete Roon endpoint available for it, so that I could change a playlist, an album etc.

I heard of DietPi, but haven’t figured it out yet.

So here’s my question to those who are experts with this stuff:

Is there any solution for running a Complete Roon-Endpoint in this configuration?

Any help appreciated!

Unfortunately, not using the Raspberry Pi/ touchscreen combination. AFAIK this uses the Roon API for basic functions such as play/ pause etc. What you’re after needs an Android or iOS device running Roon.

[Edit: Take a look at the latest Amazon Fire HD.]

Thanks for the hint!
Would the Fire HD be capable of routing a high-resolution music stream from Ethernet to USB into the Zen DAC?

1 Like

I think he means as a Roon control device, unless I’m confused, which is possible.

I’ve never tried it, but I think there is a roon remote in a browser project in tinkering. You could add a second rPi and the first would run your DAC and have ropiee on it, and the second could run raspian or whatever you want that would get you a browser on the touch screen.

You could maybe get rid of ropieee and run the roon bridge on the new more coplete linux OS that is controlling your screen. I’m not sure what is involved in configuring the roonbridge package though.

Sheldon

Not with optimal results as Roon will resample because of the way Android and Roon play together. I’d suggest you retain the Pi for bridge/ display and consider a tablet as a separate control device when sitting at your listening position.

In theory you could use a tablet such as the Fire for display instead of the Pi screen, but you’d still need the Pi for bridge. There are some mounts for most tablets–I intend to use a Fire as a wall mounted controller powered by PoE at some point.

1 Like

So, I wasn’t confused after all.

I do that all the time with an iPad, it just happens quite often that I sit listening with headphones, just to find out my iPad is in another room as soon as I want to change to some other music. Thats the reason I wished for a complete Roon endpoint on that Pi touchscreen :wink:

But, a dedicated Fire HD for that purpose only would solve that problem. It would not be in another room.

Sure, the iPad does that already. What I don’t want is another external device.
I would like to have the Endpoint device built into the Amp.

Using what you already have, and getting what you are after, will be achieved using DietPi.
It’s more complicated than implementing Ropieee, but can be done after doing some homework and reading up on it.
To top things off, you can even install an on-screen keyboard extension to the kiosk browser instance, making searches for any music or playlist a breeze!
I’d been there and done that, so you can too!
Good luck, and once everything works you’ll be proud of it!

Thats what I was looking for, thanks a lot. So I will dive into DietPi after all.
You don’t happen to have a image file of your installation that I could just copy onto a MicroSD, do you? :slight_smile:

I’m running Ropieee meanwhile, so sorry, no image handy for you.
Had it running on a RPi4 using USB out and a RPi3b+ with a HAT.
I switched, since I group and ungroup these endpoints kind of frequently, which caused problems and needed RPi reboots and such.

OK, thanks anyway, I´ll definitely try DietPi.

@Marin_Weigel What were the problems you encountered? I’m using Ropieee with great success but thinking of rolling my own with DietPi so I can switch to 64bit and add Plexamp Headless. My main concern is losing the display, but as I group and ungroup two specific endpoints fairly often I’m keen to know what other issues you had.

Let me try to reconcile, since that’s quite some time ago, and I’ve been running Ropieee for it’s stability and low maintenance operation since.

With extension manager and extension snapshots on one Pi, then running web controller with chrome browser onscreen keyboard addon on each Pi, there was player control, basic library access with search input and all that.

But shutting down the Roon server PC when not in use as well as changing grouping sometimes caused unresponsiveness or loss of the endpoint for some or all Pis, which needed all sorts of PC/Pi reboots to resolve.

In the end, it was just too much hustle and not enough added functionality to outweigh maintaining it, so I switched back to Ropieee and keeping the smartphone around to control things – haven’t looked back since.

YMMV