Thoughts on a V3 product (Kernel)

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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

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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.