Interesting, but no wifi or bluetooth, so I think not really ready to be the brains of an IOT device. Could add it, but again that’s going to be tricky to make reliable for a lot of deployments, and it adds a lot to the overhead. And I think that price doesn’t include the storage? Looks like a lot more than $20 once it’s deployed.
I’ve been playing a lot with ESP32 boards, which are insanely awesome for insanely little money ($4.50 or so), but they don’t run Linux, so I think they’d be out for a product like this, which would need to connect to Spotify, Pandora, Alexa and Google Home to be commercially viable. But if they’re just meshing together and syncing audio generated from a bluetooth connection (phone, tablet, whatever) I suppose they could work.
They have other products with a mix of features and prices, I don’t know what would be idea for a Sonos rehab. However, as Sonos speakers are not cheap products, if you can get them working again for $20 or even more I think that would be an acceptable price for most owners.
As a hobbyist product, sure. But I don’t think it would be possible to make something commercially viable on anything but the smallest scale using that SBC, especially since it costs a lot more than $20 fully outfitted. I certainly could be wrong though. But I can’t think of any commercial products that use a Pi or other recent SBC linux boxes except for maybe an NAS (can you?), and I’m guessing it’s not for lack of people trying. It’s amazing that an off-the-shelf ready for mass IOT gizmo deployment Linux SBC still doesn’t exist, to my knowledge at least. The Chip Pro was the promised land, but it was short lived.
As I understand it, most “smart” devices only go to sleep mode, so that should be the case. Perhaps a small battery could be installed as well, which gives just enough juice to let the device do its powerdown routine?
I honestly have no hope, since I lack the hardware chops to do this myself, and a big component of my plan is to make it a service offered by shops. It would require someone like Raspberry to make the replacement component and instructions, and also local repair stores to make the offer. It would make for a nice cottage industry, but without the kit and (more importantly) without the customers willing to take their sound bars in for refitting, I don’t think there will be many shops.
The kicker seems to be the combination of ‘industrial grade’/‘cheap enough’/‘small scale’.
As you note; rPi SD corruption is an issue; and the Pi is hardly the cheap SBC with the least character out there; but the options that tick the reliability and low cost criteria generally seem to be tricky to obtain in small quantities short of ripping apart commercial products; and dealing with whatever dodgy BSP awfulness lives inside(eg. the various slightly janky Mediatek SoCs that Amazon’s FireOS devices are based on are cheap as chips; and while unexceptional seem to be durable enough; but they aren’t cheap as chips in small quantities(dev boards run ~$200, and my understanding is that BSP support isn’t so hot, especially if you are a small enough customer that ‘engineering support’ is a distant dream).
If you can get away with the limitations(usually less RAM; definitely not HDMI and GPU and such) the options based on router/AP SoCs can be pretty attractively priced; offer excellent integrated connectivity options; and, while not Pi level in terms of I/O (you pretty much get one USB port, maybe some GPIO or more specialty stuff) are well suited for reasonably bulletproof embedded use. Assuming that there’s something you can hang a decent DAC from those would actually be pretty good brain-transplant candidates for this application.
That’s intresting, do you happen to know of one? Not asking for a Sonos brain transplant, so it doesn’t need to be appropriate for that (in other words doesn’t need audio out) just wondering in general.
As is probably obvious from my posts above I’m still mourning the Chip Pro:
Started at $8 but was eventually $16, so not dirt cheap, but rock solid reliable with onboard wifi, bluetooth, plenty of RAM, all the GPIOs you can eat, great form factor (tiny, easy to make PCBs for), phenomenal support community and documentation. Took awhile to get the hang of embedded Linux but doable with a little tooling. They were aimed at sort of the “pro maker” types who wanted to take a product mainstream and claimed to be “ready for orders in any quantity, from 1 to 1,000,000”. But after everyone wasted months building prototypes they went out of business without giving any explanation at all, just suddenly stopped answering emails. Which was doubly insulting because they started as a well supported Kckstarter.
I figured something would take their place quickly but they appear to have been way ahead of their time.
I’m afraid that I haven’t been shopping in that area for a while; so my knowledge is a bit out of date(on the plus side, you can often pick a SoC with OpenWRT support and then look for “%SOCNAME% SOM” and get results; on the minus side vendors of such aren’t alway around for the long haul(which is why you start with OpenWRT support before caring about vendor).
I can’t personally vouch for them; but 8Devices SOM offerings look a lot like the last ones I interacted with, though I believe it was someone else I purchased them from.
Oh, I know it is possible, but I am thinking of the suckers who plunked down several hundred for a sound bar with great speakers and amps, which will now be bricked. I just think it ought to be financially reasonable to offer them a way to just swap the now bricked computer subcomponent. Bring in a bricked Sonos, and leave with one that works again. Just not with the Sonos app, but that’s the smallest problem.
On ifixit i found 25 bose speakers that can be reapaired, and some of them lack instructions to replace the battery. Most are rated hard to repair. That’s a dealbreaker for an expensive product.
Before I buy stuff with a battery, I check ifixit to see how it can be repaired, or at least ebay, to see if replacement batteries are available.
I’ve had very good luck with mine, usually using Samsung EVO cards. I’m also a bit picky about power supplies; bad power can ruin your day
That being said, an rsync job periodically backs up my Pi 3 that’s graphing temperatures from wireless temperature sensors via an RTLSDR receiver and barometric pressure from a Sense Hat.
Really glad that doesn’t change my quote line, retroactively.
On topic: I own a Squeezebox Radio. If anyone wants to go down that rabbit hole, I suggest you look up the communities reaction when Logitech wanted all users to update to a new firmware while rebranding the Squeezebox.
As can improper shutdowns of course, which is where full stack Linux gets dicey in IOT devices. Possible obviously, I guess with read only filesystems and small writeable data areas.
Very nice. I’ve been doing similar things with them, one is connected to a Davis Vantage Pro weather station and posting it’s data via weewx to a webserver:
They’re great for this sort of thing, assuming you have some backup system in place… I can’t remember what card is in that one but it’s one of the recommended cards and it died a mysterious and abrupt death once in the 3 years it’s been doing it’s thing.
