Earlier this week, The MagPi, the official Raspberry Pi magazine, published a how-to article on creating a wee PBX using a Raspberry Pi, RasPBX and a couple of SIP phones. They invite people to “Transform your humble home phone line…
There is no question that Newtek’s NDI is rocking the world of video production. Whether in corporate video, educational video, live streaming or low-end broadcast, it allows a transition to IP transport that’s profoundly attractive in many ways.
NDI delivers high quality video at very low latency, under one frame of video. A 1080p60 NDI stream requires at most around 150 mbps. This is ideal for production applications, which are quite separate from transmission/delivery, where lower bitrates are preferred and some seconds of delay is tolerable.
In the early days of NDI, if you needed to view an NDI signal on a monitor that required a Windows PC running NDI Studio Monitor. This is an application that can pick the stream off the network and display it on a monitor. It has some nice features, like the ability to overlay a second stream (picture-in-picture) and show audio metering.
I used this approach at Cluecon 2018, with a very small PC purchased just for the task (pictured above.)
The combination of Asterisk and Raspberry Pi harkens back to a time when I was seeking to run Asterisk on an small, embedded platform. I was a little ahead of the curve, seeking this before Digium released AsteriskNOW. I tried…
Some time ago I received a Raspberry Pi B+ as a gift. It had been on my amazon wish list, and for good reason. It looked like one practical approach to emulating the venerable Logitech Squeezebox, which to this day serves as the basis for music playback hereabouts.
Since we were not expanding our music playback scheme there was at first little motivation to got ahead with this effort. That is, until the analog outputs of our existing fleet of Squeezeboxes started to fail. Eventually the analog outputs become unusable, the result of failing electrolytic capacitors. Three of our five SB3s now suffer this malady.
So, not long ago I set to the task of emulating a Squeezebox using a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, a HiFiBerry DAC and a 4 GB micro-SD memory card. To this core I added a suitable case, a power-over-Ethernet splitter and piCorePlayer. All in, this rig cost under $100.
When stuff just works all the time it doesn’t often come up in conversation, which just seems wrong. After all, it’s still working! It’s the stuff that doesn’t consistently work that gets the attention.
We’ve used Logitech Squeezeboxes for musical playback around the property for a very long while. We presently have five of them deployed, including our original Squeezebox 3 that was purchased in 2005! In general they just work, which has been great, especially since they were discontinued years ago.
When we stage our annual Halloween festivities we are required to reposition some equipment. Last time around one Squeezebox powered-up with a fault in the analog output. One channel is delivered with level much reduced compared to the other channel. A quick search of the still lively forums.slimdevices.com turned up similar reports, attributing the problem to faulty capacitors in the analog output stage.
This past week I bought our fifth Squeezebox 
We now have three in service and two that have failed. Two failures over about eight years is completely tolerable. We remain committed to using the Squeezeboxen even if Logitech has discontinued the line.
I think that Logitech stumbled in their decision to discontinue the Squeezebox line. The product range has a substantial and very loyal user base. It will continue to do so since they have ported both the Squeeze Center Server and Squeezebox player software to the little Raspberry Pi SBC.