German (Germany) 
English (United Kingdom) tl;dr
It is about a maker project, the self-construction of a device with small LCD color display and touch functionality on which any information can be displayed. The device is connected to the local network via WLAN and can get the data from different audio sources, which can then be displayed on the display. Roon (server), Spotify, and Apple Music are supported as audio sources. Any audio source (zone) offered in the network can be selected via the touch display. For the selected zone, the cover is displayed for the currently played title, as well as important information about the title (zone, artist, album, title). Playback can be controlled via buttons (forward, back, play/pause, random play, shuffle play). The device can be conveniently configured and controlled via an app that runs on all important platforms (iPhone, iPad, Android, Macos, Windows, Linux).
The Coverplayer is an LCD display, which is driven by a Raspberry Zero 2W.
The device is based on the RoonMatrix project.
This is essentially a CPU board with a quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 CPU, which is clocked with 1GHz and has 512 MB LPDDR2 SDRAM.
The board can communicate wirelessly via a 2.4GHz 802.11 B/G/N Wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.2 incl. Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) with the outside world.
The operating system including the control software can be written on a micro SD card and pushed into the corresponding micro SD slot of the board.
The board also has a versatile 40pin I/O port. This is used in this project to connect a touch LCD color display.
Above all, this board is very compact. It only measures 65 x 30 x 5mm, and can therefore be integrated very well into small devices - as here in the Coverplayer.
This is what the CPU board looks like:
The control software is based on the RoonMatrix project, which can also be found here on this Blog. It was expanded to control the touch display.
The device is much easier to build than the RoonMatrix LED display, except for 3 cables, does not have to be soldered here.
Therefore It should be possible for people without a lot of experience in soldering and hardware assembly to replicate it successfully.
The Coverplayer essentially consists of the following components:
- a Raspberry Zero 2W Controller Board
- a Pimoroni Hyperpixel 4.0 Touch color display
- a suitable case
- a USB-C socket
- a power switch
- a power supply
It can be expanded with a power bank and can therefore be used anywhere without a cable:
- a Powerbank
- a power cable to connect Coverplayer and Powerbank
Component list with links
The Software
The software enables the Coverplayer to configure and control various things. A central feature of this is the support for the perhaps best music control software at the moment: Roon.
By tapping the cover, the Coverplayer is opening an overlay menu. With the buttons for source selection and play control, you can control what can be heard on the various output channels, which are connected via the Roon Server or web server (for Spotify and Apple Music).
This can be Bluetooth headphones, digital amplifiers, or streamers who are ROON-READY, or other output devices of a Mac or PC the Roon Client software is running on.
The play control buttons allows you to jump to the next music title, or jump back to the title before what is currently played, to stop the stream, or to start again.
Control whether you want to repeat the playlist or want to play the titles in random order is also possible via appropriate buttons (Repeat / Shuffle Mode).
But of course it is not only possible to control the channels.
In addition to the cover, the display shows the information for the currently played title of the selected zone: the name of the Roon Zone, Artist, Album, and the title.
But there is more: In addition to Roon, Apple Music and Spotify is also supported, so that the cover and the title information can also be displayed for the titles played with this music apps. These can also be controlled using buttons for the playback functions. But this is not possible out-of-the box, some software in the form of a local web server is required. You can find more information about this here.
Which details should be displayed in what way can be configured accordingly via the terminal connection (SSH) in a config file.
The configuration is much more comfortable with a suitable app, which is available for Apple (Macos, iOS), Android, as well as Windows and Linux (Arm and Intel).
The app offers the following advantages:
- Complete configuration via App.
- Control of the audio streams via a virtual key field.
- Monitoring of the current Coverplayer variables.
- Coverplayer log of the last hour (s).
Here are a few screenshots:
