Airplay?

Hi! Is the netduino 2 pro capable to be used as an Apple airplay Server? Has anyone done this before? I already Set up a raspberry for the Job but its an Overkill for this task. My Dream would be an mikrocontroller airplay device with spdif out. Possible? Regards

Welcome to the forum!

 

I've been looking to make something similar to what you want.

 

I may sound negative now, but I strongly doubt a N2+ is right for the job. I guess it could cope with the incoming network stream, but to decode MPEG (or whatevever format it is) and possibly converting that to PCM sending it through S/P-DIF...I don't think so.

 

Naturally, I think you could do it with the help of some external hardware for audio decoding and an audio transmitter. Depending on what encoding Airplay uses for audio and if you can extract it using the N2+, the VS1053B might work for decoding the compressed audio (it can decode Flac among many other formats) and can also output I2S. You would then need a transmitter like the DIT4096 or the DIT4192 to convert the I2S to PCM using an RS422 linedriver and audio transformer for S/P-DIF output or you can use a Toslink transmitter directly from the DIT4096 for optical output.

 

Hope this helps!

Although I really like .NET MF boards, why would you want to replace Raspberry Pi with less powerful board that costs twice as much? Also, .NET MF is not really designed for any real-time tasks such as audio processing or streaming...

For the sport of it?

I'm of the same mindset... Love the Netduino, but if the Pi is suited for the job and is a great price factor stick with the Pi.

The reason I was thinking about Netduino for Airplay is because the PI, out of the box, has a rw filesystem plus microSD.  Both of these are known to lead to corruption due to a unplanned power loss. I want my PI-Shairplay system that drives some outdoor speakers to be more appliance-like.  That's where a real embedded system would be better.

 

Right now I have the PI running from a USB flash drive, with the root filesystem read only, but still boots from SD.

 

Shairplay is all C & Perl - could be migrated to C#.  Maybe I just need to do some more reading on embedding Linux,