Nuts and Volts - August 2015

is a matter of personal choice, taste, and budget.

When I started thinking about how I would do it, I looked around my shop and found some leftover baltic birch (BB) plywood and some 1/8” black translucent sheet plastic/acrylic that I had from past projects.

So, that is what I decided to use. I will describe what I did in the hope it will be helpful at least for a starting point in whatever you do if you decide to build a music player for yourself. Note if you use a different USB sound module than I did you may have to alter the dimensions given in the discussion that follows.

First thing I did was to figure out the size of the enclosure I needed to build to house all of the components: RPi, Flash drive, USB sound module, etc. So, I plugged all of the components together and with a ruler determined the minimum volume necessary.

I decided the internal dimensions had to be at least 2-1/2” deep by 6” wide and 1-1/8” tall. Past experience told me it was not a good idea to try and minimize the enclosure size, so I decided on slightly larger internal dimensions of 3” deep by 7” wide and 1-1/4” tall. This size would allow me to easily fit all of the required components.

Next, I decided that the enclosure I was to make from BB would need to have at least a 1/2” thick border to make it structurally rigid. So, the outside dimension of the enclosure would be 8” by 4”. To achieve the desired height, I would need to glue 3/4” and 1/2” pieces of the BB plywood together. With that decided, I made a template out of 1/4” MDF that was 8” by 4”. I rounded the corners of the template for a more sleek look (IMHO). I marked the template with an arrow to indicate the top front side.

On my router table, I set up a flush cutting bit with a bearing on the bottom that would ride on the template

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■ Photo 2. Internal view of the music player.

■ Photo 1. Case/enclosure during construction.

Resources

The following websites have information pertinent to this discussion: • The website of the developer of the Pi MusicBox software is www.woutervanwijk.nl/pimusicbox/.