Hardware installation of the Raspberry Pi/HiFiBerry
Hardware installation of the Raspberry Pi/HiFiBerry
Tutorial: Multiroom Audio System Based On Raspberry Pi And Hifiberry
The Hifiberry Amp+ is a daughter board for the Raspberry Pi A+, B+ and 2B, which is directly plugged onto its GPIO pins. It is delivered with some small plastic spacers.
The speciality of this board is (in addition to converting the digital signal with much better quality than the Raspberry Pi) that it serves as a 25 W amplifier. On the backside, you can see the connector for plugging it easily onto the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi.
On the side, there’s a jack to power the board and 6 wire terminals. The 2 on the left can be used to power the board instead of the jack, and the other 4 to connect a pair of stereo loudspeakers directly, using audio cables (2 per speaker).
Important: The board needs 12-18 V. The Raspberry Pi is powered directly from it. It is important to not use the usual 5 V power supply on the Raspberry Pi. This is great, since one less cable is needed. The board is very small so it doesn’t protrude from the Raspberry Pi. To avoid breaking the GPIOs, some plastic spacers hold the Amp+ board in place. The Raspberry Pi already has some holes for them. After the spacers are mounted, the AMP+ can be fixed on the Raspberry Pi.
Now the audio cables can be connected.
With this setup, we need much fewer cables than before and the quality increases drastically. Fewer connections means fewer possible sources of problems.
Finally I set this up for 7 boards:
- 6 Raspberry B+, which I got for €25.90
- 1 Raspberry Pi 2B as the Squeezebox server to stream the music. It has enough power to handle this without problems (I will come to this later)
- 7 Hifiberry Amp+, which work with all newer Raspberry Pis (A+/B+/2B)
- 7 micro SD cards
For the latter, I had chosen some 16 GB micro SD cards, because there was a special offer, but 8 GB are more than enough. Eventually I discovered a known incompatibility of Samsung’s SD cards with the Raspberry Pi, which sometimes don’t boot. Of course I experienced this problem, and that’s why I finally went with some Transcend cards, which work without any problems.
