EN | 中文

DigiPlayer - A Clean Touch UI for Volumio 3

DigiPlayer is a clean touch UI for Volumio 3, written in Flutter for the Raspberry Pi Touch Display.

Feng Zhou, 2021-12

This is a simple user interface for Volumio 3, the Linux distribution for music playback. I wrote it for playing music with the Raspberry Pi + 7-inch touch screen. The end result looks like this,

Features,

• Designed for landscape mode. The Volumio touch screen plugin works best in portrait.
• Good performance even on Raspberry Pi 3.
• Touch-native UI similar to mobile apps. It runs on flutter-pi and no X-window is used.

Building DigiPlayer

Before this gets packaged as a Volumio plugin, here is what you need to build DigiPlayer from scratch,

• Raspberry Pi 3 or 4.
• Official Raspberry Pi 7-inch touch display.
• Your dev computer (Windows/Mac/Linux)
• A Linux x64 computer or VM (for compiling app.so)

First, take a look at flutter engine binaries repository to see which version of Flutter is available for Raspberry Pi. As of writing it is 2.5.3.

Go ahead and install that version of Flutter on the dev computer.

Check out flutter engine binaries on the Linux computer.

mkdir -p work/flutter
cd work/flutter
git clone https://github.com/ardera/flutter-engine-binaries-for-arm

Build DigiPlayer on dev computer

cd digiplayer

# Check build_release.sh for changes of dir locations, etc.
# This script build the flutter bundle locally, then ssh to the linux box to build app.so
# Then check lib/main.dart for changes to serverAddr (volumio.local works for me), defaultDir, etc.
./build_release.sh

# If successful, build/flutter_assets will contain artifacts, including app.so

Assuming Volumio 3 is already installed on Pi, follow instructions on flutter-pi page to install flutter-pi, the Flutter runtime for Pi. Compilation should only take a few minutes.

Now you can finally get the app onto Pi, and run it,

rsync -av build/flutter_assets/* [email protected]:digiplayer/
ssh [email protected]
flutter-pi --release digiplayer

You should see DigiPlayer as shown at the beginning of this README.

Optionally you can add it to /etc/rc.local to run every time Pi starts up.

sleep 5
/sbin/runuser -l root -c '/usr/local/bin/flutter-pi --release /home/volumio/digiplayer' > /home/volumio/log &

See tweaks.md for more adjustments I found useful.

Why Volumio?

Here is what I like about this setup,

• It plays music anywhere in the home network. I mostly use the device to play music files stored in a NAS. It is very convenient. I do not even need to touch the device to add new music.
• Good audio quality with digital connections. I attached a HiFi Berry Digi compatible HAT to the Pi, and output audio through SPDIF fiber to my soundbar. I 3D-printed a back-cover (OpenSCAD design here) for better looks.
• Use your phone as a remote. Just point phone browser to http://volumio.local. Then you can browse and control your music playing there, from couch or anywhere. The Pi's play screen stays synchronized. On iPhone, touch share->add to home screen for easier access later.
• Volumio has a tons of audio features that I have not find time to explore yet.