Thoughts on a V3 product (Kernel)

As the old adage goes don’t buy anything until V3 comes out.

Let’s assume that the V3 product is due in about 18 months from now (2015Q2).

By this time a number of interesting things should have happened:

  1. SoC (System on a chip) RAM sizes will have grown to 4Gb.
  2. mSATA disk sizes will be doubled (For db / metadata storage)
  3. Quad core ARM processor
  4. Windows 10 / Windows Nano merge to make a small footprint, ARM based Windows machine

This gives the real prospect of a small headless Core (let’s call it the Kernel)

So. This Kernel would act very similar to today’s Core except:

  1. Headless - initial configure via HTTP then leave alone.
  2. All audio held on NAS / SMB shares (or Tidal / other streaming services)
  3. No audio out (or possibly Asynchronous USB)
  4. Wired gigabit Ethernet.

Physically the Kernel would be little more than a next generation Raspberry PI / Beadlebone Black in a nice case (RF radiation etc) with a non switched mode PSU (RF again).

Roonlabs would supply a disk image and the hardware could be produced by a third party.

Indeed the configuration could be held in the cloud so there would be no need for even a web server on the Kernel - just go to https://setup.roonlabs.com which could use some IP address fun to ‘know’ which Kernel is on the same subnet as the user.

The big advantages e of Kernel over Core (for me) are:
1. Cost - hardware would be pretty much off the shelf and SoC based so very cheep
2. Small, quiet, headless
3. Updates via the cloud, so no onward maintenance

Cheers,

Rik

1 Like

I would second that but with audio output as well. I would love to keep my setup which includes a Raspberry Pi 2/Hifiberry Digi+ as a streamer to my DAC. So, in a very small package, I kept my system clean running Runeaudio.