The Logitech SqueezeBox was a device you hooked up to your stereo so you could stream music from a Network Attached Storage (NAS) box or your desktop computer over the network. That might not sound very exciting now, but when [Aaron Ciuffo] bought it back in 2006, it was a pretty big deal. The little gadget has been chugging all these years, but the cracks are starting to form. Before it finally heads to that great electronics recycling center in the sky, he’s decided to start work on its replacement.
Thanks to the Raspberry Pi, building a little device to stream digital audio from a NAS is easy these days. But a Pi hooked up to a USB speaker isn’t necessarily a great fit for the living room. [Aaron] didn’t necessarily want his replacement player to actually look like the SqueezeBox, but he wanted it to be presentable. While most of us probably would have tried to make something that looked like a traditional piece of audio gear, he took his design is a somewhat more homey direction.
The Raspberry Pi 4 and HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro live inside of a wooden laser cut case that [Aaron] designed with OpenSCAD. We generally associate this tool with 3D printing, but here he’s exporting each individual panel as an SVG file so they can be cut out. We especially like that he took the time to add all of the internal components to the render so he could be sure everything fit before bringing the design into the corporeal world.
While the case was definitely a step in the right direction, [Aaron] wasn’t done yet. He added a WaveShare e-Paper 5.83″ display and mounted it in a picture frame. Software he’s written for the Raspberry Pi shows the album information and cover art on the display while the music is playing, and the current time and weather forecast when it’s idle. He’s written the software to plug into Logitech’s media player back-end to retain compatibility with the not-quite-dead-yet SqueezeBox, but we imagine the code could be adapted to whatever digital media scheme you’re using.
Over the years, we’ve seen a number of SqueezeBox replacements. Many of which have been powered by the Raspberry Pi, but even the ESP8266 and ESP32 have gotten in on the action recently.
I have 3 squeezeboxes and all are still working fine. I use the Logitech Media Server running on a computer with Vortexbox that serves video to my theater system using Plex. I was a real doubter about the vacuum fluorescent displays in the Squeezebox, but one has held up fine for over 10 years and another for over 8 years.
Vortexbox seems to no longer be supported, so one of these days I’ll have to find an alternative.
I have a WAK3300 which still works, though it was not that great from the beginning (and it was abandonded pretty quickly by Philips). Amusingly, my wife uses it as a regular radio.
I have 3 SqueezeBoxes running in my house- one is a beta product! Love them dearly.