Heh... thanks!
I know that mergers between development branches can often be a bear to manage successfully... I've seen a few which were more train-wrecks than convergences... but I'll gladly keep my fingers crossed that this one goes well.
Here are a couple of quick photos of my weekend-project player:
Part of the challenge to this, was that I wanted to make the player out of as many recycled, surplus, and out-of-my-big-junk-box-of-interesting-stuff parts as I could, with as few "new-item" purchases as possible. I could certainly have gone out and gotten a nice commercial case and kit for it, but as they say, where's the fun in that? The rest of the system I'm using it with is of the same ilk... a pair of rotted-out Minimus 77 mini-speakers that I bought for about $5, and gave a tender-loving upgrade (re-foamed the woofers, scratch-built a new Zilch crossover with decent 5-way connectors, vibration-coated the cabinets) and a Proton D940 that needed a bunch of TLC (new power switch, full cleaning of the controls, and an IF alignment). I love bringing old stuff back from Beyond.
So... anyhow, what you see is the result of my recycling and improvisation over the course of a weekend. The case is (clearly) from an old Black Box GPIB converter that I'd bought for $5 (and you can't find a nice new metal case for that sort of price). The TO-220 heatsink came off of the converter's PC board. The back panel had been mounted to the converter PC boards and was now floating loose, so I just mounted it with a couple of angle brackets and some JB Weld. The power switch, polyfuse, capacitors, and regulators came out of my junkbox (the big regulator is a Micrel high-reliablility part from a surplus buy - basically a 7805 on steroids - I measured 3 and they were all between 5.00 and 5.02 volts). The RCA jacks were a surplus buy (the yellow "video" jack is unused). Hot-melt glue was used where appropriate.
There's certainly more I could do to this... maybe some front-mounted GPIO-driven LEDs for status, and/or some switches hooked up to a script which would issue play/pause/skip/shutdown commands. I'll wait to see if inspiration strikes.
I may build another of these at some point, for the primary music system in the living room. If I do I'm sure I'll pay a lot more attention to detail and cosmetics, in addition to audiophilia. I like the idea of using a DAC with a low-jitter on-board "master" clock - running the DAC directly from a crystal has always appealed to me. Maybe use a box big enough to support a decent-sized LCD touchscreen (I got one of the 2.8" screens along with the Pi I bought, but it's really too small to be useful for control).
