HeadberryPi in a Guitar

 

HeadberryPi in a Guitar

This is an archived documentation. It won't be updated anymore and it might not be accurate anymore.

Hi Hifiberry Team,

I’ve bought one of your amazing Hifiberry Dac+ Standard RCA Version to build up together with a Raspberry Pi B+ a HiFi streamer. I got the idea to put a little headphone amp into it to have a standalone headberrypi running. As an headphone amp I decide to use a build-in headphone amp for studio use from Funk Tonstudiotechnik Berlin. This headphone amp has an impressive reputation in studio environments. A phone call later with Mr. Funk, he gave me the tip to use a second output with a asymmetric-to-symmetric converter to use the headberrypi as headphone amp and also as a preamp for my active loudspeakers.

So now the technical data are fixed, so far so cool, but where should it fit in? A standard aluminum box sounds too trivial. I did some intense brainstorming (and for sure a couple of red wine were involved) and found that the right place for all this is to tinker it into an electric guitar.

The complete bunch worked very well for me and with the Hifiberry DAC+ it sounds really good. Big Thanks to you guys from Hifiberry for to develop such great components.

Best regards,
Knut

Have a look below for some inside views and details to the hardware and software.

Left side:
HiFiBerry DAC+ standard RCA
Raspberry B+ with TP-Link USB wifi card

Middle:
Power Unit for Funk Head/Pre-Amp: Funk Powerunit PWS-04a.V2

Right side:
Circuit Board with Funk LPA-2 Phone-Amp

Lower left side:
Asymetric-to-Symmetric Converter Funk SSOM-03b

Apple Power Adapter / Varta Powerbank
Old e-guitar from C.Giant

The Raspberry got some tweaks to relieve the SD card and runs only the HiFiBerry DAC+, the MPD service and a drive mapping to my Debian file server.
To control the guy I decide first to use Auremo for MS and MPod for iOS. That worked good for me but it start to bore me. So I installed Virtualbox as a service on the file server and run an Apache with Patchfork. Now I can control the MPD additionally using a browser. To get the best sound I control the volume trough the headphone amp and not via software in mpd.

Software:
Raspbian 3.12.29+
MPD version 0.16.7
Patchfork

Last updated: October 4, 2019