paulcdb

Well, in case anyone thinks of torturing yourself building doing, don’t use SD cards!

Set everything up but there was a little stuttering and no amount of offloading to ram eliminated it so now testing an NVME drive thru USB. Again, not ideal but I’m not in a rush to pay inflated PI prices so while I have a 2TB NVME hat, I don’t have a PI 5 so… make do where you can! lol

My plan was to get a 2-3TB but thought it’d be too much so tried shoehorning it before remembering I already had the drive! 🤦‍♂️ 🤨

I run my own unifi setup so network stuff spread over a number of devices so don’t really have much of an issue. The zero’s only do audio streaming though on minimal os that can’t phone home or update and they seem ok so far but atm i’m still breaking stuff while i tweak stuff, lol

But when i leave them alone to play they seem to do fine. I mean they should all cache a few seconds of audio so drop outs aren’t an issue, the problem with most wifi is likely too many devices on 1 AP or poor reconnect coding which unifi seem pretty good with. 😎

I’m in the process of building a multi-room audio system atm.

Snapserver/snapclients for the streaming audio, 1 audio stream with mpd to be set as 24/7 music, 1 for podcasts, 1 for alerts.

Alerts interrupt both streams to play the alerts. PI 4 for the main audio stack, first speaker, 2nd PI zero w/pirate radio hat/2 5w speakers for the portable speaker that should run most of the day on battery.

PodFetch gets the podcasts, script creates a playlist each day to play the oldest podcasts first. Although kinda surprised PodFetch doesn’t seem to let me do this.

Once it all runs smoothly i’ll put PI Zero W’s/Speakers in the other room and then going to build a 7” esp32 display to allow selecting which speaker plays which stream. Maybe later do something where each stream plays a different genre.

does the system wait for electricity to flow in before it flows out?

Basically, yes!

If you unplug the micro inverter, it’ll cut the power within milliseconds of it detecting no electric signal. AC alternates around 50hz in the UK which the inverter detects and starts generating. Once it losses the hz signal it stops.

I really question the ROI on this sort of thing

Depends if you do it right.

In the UK, you can buy 2 ~400w for about 140, then £100 for the micro inverter. I have 4 295w panels mounted on a flat, raised frame on the side of a shed and they cut my bill from £150 down to around £70 last month. So yes, they can pay for themselves pretty quickly.

And once they’re paid for, it’s all free electric! And we’re now seeing batteries with plugin style so you can store the electric to run white goods, saving even more, etc.

Also, unless you get a solar tracker, “optimally aligned” isn’t really possible. The sun moves inclination every day depending on where you live. Here in summer you’d want a more horizontal position, in winter a more vertical position which is why solar fencing is actually becoming a thing because they generate more in winter.