Raspberry Pi Media Streamer Is Combat Ready

We are truly living in the golden age of media streaming. From the Roku to the Chromecast, there is no shortage of cheap devices to fling your audio and video anywhere you please. Some services and devices may try to get you locked in a bit more than we’d like (Amazon, we’re looking at you), but on the whole if you’ve got media files on your network that you want to enjoy throughout the whole house, there’s a product out there to get it done.

But why buy an easy to use and polished commercial product when you can hack together your own for twice the price and labor over it for hours? While you’re at it, why not build the whole thing into a surplus ammo can? This the line of logic that brought [Zwaffel] to his latest project, and it makes perfect sense to us.

It should come as no surprise that a military ammo can has quite a bit more space inside than is strictly required for the Raspberry Pi 3 [Zwaffel] based his project on. But it does make for a very comfortable wiring arrangement, and offers plenty of breathing room for the monstrous 60 watt power supply he has pumping into his HiFiBerry AMP+ and speakers.

On the software side the Pi is running Max2Play, a Linux distro designed specifically for streaming audio and video remotely. [Zwaffel] says that with this setup he is able to listen to music on his Squeezebox server as well as watch movies via Kodi.

While none are quite as battle-hardened as this, we have seen several other Raspberry Pi Squeezebox clients over the years if you’re looking for more inspiration.

21 thoughts on “Raspberry Pi Media Streamer Is Combat Ready

  1. Tacticool….but what happens if I poke the speaker cones with a not even very sharp stick? … ah I see, you send the predator out on a enemy combatant blunt stick denial mission first.

  2. Why ruin a ammo can and expose the speakers when you could of just had the speakers facing up,so that all you had to do is remove the lid and lay it on it’s side, while retaining it weather proof seal when not in use

  3. “It should come as no surprise that a military ammo can has quite a bit more space inside than is strictly required for the Raspberry Pi 3 [Zwaffel] based his project on.” I’m not sure – the size of the enclosure has an influence on how well the speakers perform. Without specs on the speakers, my gut feel is the size is somewhere between about right and a bit on the small side.

    1. Hi guys,

      Very happy that this being received well. The creator has been very forthcoming in communicating with us in this project. We very much look forward to his next build :)

      Regarding your point, Ken, we actually already shared a project utilizing Pi Zero Wireless with MiniAmp for a stand-alone clock radio system. It’s called Tivoli by Riccardo Raponi and you can find in our Blog (not sure if I can link it here in the comments).

  4. Still no Blend-tec blender with a RPi + Arduino + ESP8266 running a streaming services while handling a mail server that can control blend speeds with push update notifications while listening to the radio and watching a Movie on a 2.4″ lcd in the blender control panel.

  5. Where I live and shop, ammo boxes are very common, but I never looked at them as potential project boxes. I really like the idea. They stay closed when they need to and easily open when wanted. Nice metal construction, almost perfect and cheap too. :-)

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