Episode: 2019
Title: HPR2019: a pi project and an owncloud project
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2019/hpr2019.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:22:25

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This is HPR episode 2019 entitled, A Pie Project and An Own Cloud Project.
It is hosted by Matt Maduro, G33K Mad and is about 17 minutes long.
The summary is a short episode where I describe a couple of geeky projects I've been working
on.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Anasthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Hello Hacker Public Radio, my name is Matt McGraw, I am the stay-at-home geek dad in Northern
California and I am recording an episode for you this evening.
I just listened to Ken Fallon's show where he was talking about the fact that the numbers
of shows in the queue has dwindled to close to zero and so because I love HPR and I want
HPR to continue I decided I would record a show.
So this is a show that I am talking to you about a couple of projects, little tech projects
that I've been working on at my house and in my life and so I want to tell you a little
bit about those.
As always links will be in the show notes and along with a copy of my outline so I hope
you'll find some use from what I'm about to tell you and if it's new information that's
great and if it's not that's great too and if you have any comments please feel free to
leave them on the episode page or to contact me directly by email.
I'll be giving my email address at the end of the show and it will also be in the show
notes.
The first project involves a Raspberry Pi.
I got a Raspberry Pi 2 for Christmas.
Well I technically got an Amazon gift card and used that to buy a Raspberry Pi in a case
for Christmas and I've tried a couple things.
I installed OwnCloud on it.
I'm a big fan of OwnCloud.
I'm probably going to be doing an OwnCloud episode in a little bit.
Once I have a little bit more information fleshed out about what exactly I want to talk
about but also the second project that I'm going to talk about in this show involves
OwnCloud.
Hopefully that will be something you can enjoy as well.
Anyway, I got my Raspberry Pi for Christmas and I installed, like I said, I tried OwnCloud
on it.
The Ubuntu Mate desktop, which actually runs very, very well on the Raspberry Pi and if
I needed a desktop, that would be a great one to use because it's snappy and just does
everything it's supposed to do.
One thing I do really love however aside from technology is music and I know there are
quite a few music lovers of varying stripes on the show and or that have hosted shows
for HDR.
You all can understand how important it is to be able to get to your music and listen
to what you want, one you want and to that end, I have an Amazon Echo which I love and
as long as I'm wanting to play Pandora or some tune in stations, I can do through that
and I heart radio and of course Amazon Prime streaming music.
But I have quite a bit of a collection of my own music that I have converted from CDs
to FLAQ and I have a little NAS device, it's a Western Digital My Cloud 2TB that sits
on my home network and I have a lot of my audio files there.
And I also really enjoy some web radios like the channels from Soma FM, a couple of
my favorites are of course Groove Salad and Beat Blunder and Space Station Soma and some
of the more down tempo chill and ambient stations I really enjoy listening to when I go
to sleep or when I'm trying to work on something and I need background noise but I don't
do so well if my background noise has words.
So that's why these things are really good options for me.
So I've looked at Sonos and many of the other digital radio streaming, household music,
player devices and they're all really cool and they're all quite expensive and I figured
there has to be a better way and it's funny because both of the projects I'm going to
talk about tonight are on this show, I mean tonight where I am on the west coast of
the United States.
The second project I'm going to talk about is also a, there's a proprietary project
that can do this but I wanted to do it myself for cheaper kind of project.
So anyway back to the Raspberry Pi and music.
I knew that you could set up the Pi to stream music to it and then play it through speakers
so I looked into a couple different ways of doing that and I could have set up a regular
desktop with an audio player and then used VNC or whatever I could have set up an MPD
instance and done it that way but I knew that there were, or I assumed that there were
some ready made distros for the Pi that would do this.
So the first one I looked at was called, it's called Pi Music Box and our good friend
Nightwise and Belgium had recommended Pi Music Box and it's good, it worked, it did what
I wanted it to do but the interface was a little clunky and I was really going to be
using it mostly from my phone and I didn't think that the phone interface for Pi Music Box
was the best one.
So I came across another distro called Roon Audio, R-U-N-E-A-U-D-I-O and again as I said
the link will be in the show notes but it's an arch based Pi distro and it's available
for all three models, base models, all three base models of the Raspberry Pi both 1, 2,
and 3 and basically it is a very paired down instance of arch Linux and a pre-installed
and configured MPD server and then it has its own client that you can run on Android.
I'm not sure if they have an iOS app right now but the Android app works great on both
phone and tablet and also they have a web interface, it's all basically the same interface
just scales for whatever side screen you're working with so yeah and I'm familiar with
MPD, I've used it in the past, I actually got really geeky with my music one time and
installed MPD on my laptop and then used a client to play my music instead of just using
one of the bloated players like Rhythm Box or Banshee or Amarok or one of those.
So the tech in Roon Audio is just, it's really cool and it's really well developed and
basically the steps are simple, you flash the image to the SD card and you boot it,
you're boot the pie, generally speaking you have to boot the network cable connected
because it doesn't, at least on the pie 2, doesn't recognize the Wi-Fi dongle that I
use and there's no way for it to connect to my password protected, WPA protected, Wi-Fi
network at home anyway because there'd be no way to give it the keys but so you booted
up with a network card attached and our network cables, excuse me, attached and after it
finishes booting which actually can take a little bit because it's setting up a whole
bunch of things and the first boot always takes the longest but you can just connect to
HTTP colon slash slash Roon Audio slash on your local network or Roon Audio dot local depending
on how you have your home network set up and it's really, it's really simple, there's
basically three sections to the interface, there's the library, there's the now playing
and there's the queue and then of course there's a settings panel where you can tell it
what the Wi-Fi network is and give your Wi-Fi passphrase and any number of little options
like that. So from my use case I used the facility that Roon Audio has in order to mount
a somber share from the NAS box on my network and I pointed it at the music directory and I hit
index and it pulled all the songs and I pulled all the tags and most of my songs I have the
the cover art embedded in the MP3 but some of them I just have like a cover dot jpeg in the folder
and regardless it finds those pieces of cover art in the file system and displays them on the
client whether it's or I'm sorry the control interface whether it's the tablet or my smartphone
or my laptop and you can create playlists and you can queue up files and it works really well
and then in terms of web radios it really wants a direct server link so sometimes like if you're
local radio station like my local NPR station here in California's capital public radio and they
provide an M3U playlist some web radios offer a .pls playlist and basically Roon Audio can't
decipher those as they come but you can open up each of them up with a text editor and there's always
a HTTP address in there that ends in .ogg or .mp3 or whatever format .aac whatever format the stream
is playing and use that url and paste it in and I've added 5 or 6 web radios to Roon Audio a couple
of different stations from Selma FM and also a couple of different streams from capital public
radio here at a Sacramento so it works really well and I have it plugged into an old dual cd plus
ipod doc bookshelf stereo system and it sounds great now there's one caveat and that is that the
analog audio out from the Raspberry Pi 2 is not very good quality I tried plugging headphones
in it I tried plugging just a regular 8-inch stereo cable into a set of speakers and it didn't
sound good at all coming out of the pie so I ordered an 8 dollar USB sound card it's basically
just a USB dongle with an 8-inch stereo headphone jack and an 8-inch stereo microphone jack
and I connected from the headphone jack to my bookshelf stereo system and it works like a dream
and it sounds great and I can log into the pie via the like I said the web interface or the
Android app and and queue up some music and just let it play in my family room while I'm
getting the kids ready for school or doing dishes or or whatever it is so anyway that's the
that's the first project that I've been working on and I'll be right back to tell you about
the second one one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven quag live
okay so in the second project that I wanted to tell you about relies on my own cloud server
and an android app called pick frame that's p i c f r a m e all one word and I will put links to
the android app and also to the web page about pick frame in the show notes but the basic idea is
that you can turn any old android device into a digital photo frame and it can read photos off
the local SD card that's in whatever device or the local memory of the device that you're running it
on but the really neat part is that you can point it at an own cloud instance and it will pull
photos from the own cloud instance and display those on whatever device you're using as a digital
photo frame this works out really well for me because I have I have older parents that are here
and live very close to me but they don't always get to go on trips with the kids that we take
them on or or they may not be available to go to the zoo when we go to the zoo or to the beach or
wherever and so what I'm able to do is take pictures with my cell phone while I'm out and about
and I can be essentially anywhere in the world taking pictures with my cell phone
and then I can then upload them to a special account I have set up on my own cloud server
that all it contains is pictures and the photo frame that's actually a six inch fire HD tablet
and it was on fire HD 6 tablet that one of my kids got a new version of a slightly bigger screen
so we had the the six inch leftover and I just took that over my mom and dad's I loaded up the app
and I pointed it at the own cloud server and it's it's really cool because I can just upload a photo
and the refresh window on the app can be set and I believe the lowest setting is an hour so once
an hour it'll pull the server for new photos and if there are any new photos it just adds them to
the slideshow so it's really cool I can be out with my kids and take a picture with my phone
and upload it to my own cloud server and I know that within an hour there's going to be a brand new
photo on my on my mom and dad's photo frame so that's just that's again these are not not difficult
projects or anything that have taken a whole lot of technical know how on my and especially but
they were projects that I had been trying to find proprietary solutions for and found it so much
better to be able to roll my own I know that I think it was Polaroid or Kodak had a Wi-Fi enabled
photo frame a few years back that would pull photos out of your Facebook stream or from an email
address and that that's how they would would get the pictures for their frame but it was 80 or 90
bucks and you know I already have my own cloud server and I had this tablet line around and the
Amazon are the Android app is free so it just seemed like the right way to go and so
anyway those are the two projects that I've been working on and things that I'm kind of proud of
the way I've been able to introduce a little bit of the geek a little bit of the hacker ethos
into my life and into the lives of my family and I hope that all of you can get out there and do
the same thing please check the show notes if you want to find out about rune audio or about
pick frame I'm more than happy to feel questions either from the comment form on the episode page or
if you'd like to email me directly my email address is matty at thestrangeland.net and again that
will be in the show notes I would love to hear from you and thanks for listening hey get out there
hit the big red record button recorder show for hpr we need shows we need shows we need shows
get out there and record a show for hpr Ken will thank you I will thank you the myriad listeners
of hpr will thank you so that we don't have to shutter this project thanks for listening
you
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