What is it?

The Raspberry Pi Home Media Center is a compact and neatly designed hardware project that combines the power of the Raspberry Pi Zero board and the Hi-Fi audio capabilities of the TI’s TAS5805M DAC with a highly efficient D-Class output stage. This versatile media center provides a customizable and fully open-source hardware platform for home entertainment.

Louder Raspberry Pi	Louder Raspberry Pi NOPD

With a minimalistic but functional design inspired by commercial audio gear, it offers a seamless user experience. It aimed to support Volumio, Mopidy, or any custom firmware you may come up with.

Why did I build it

I did few audio projects in the past, some using ESP32, some using larger Orange Pi and Raspberry Pi devices. Each has its pros and cons, and each iteration I'm trying to focus on the details that were working best for me, while actually using them.

What is special about the Raspberry eco-system is of course its community support. Being a not-so-strong software developer, I often have to rely on the work that other people did and baked into the base Raspbian image. Enabling Ethernet, and IR reader is as simple as adding 2 lines into config.txt file. Adding DAC is a 5 minutes job (with attached code). All the device tree definitions, kernel drivers, and dependency packages are already in place, believe it or not.

Sure, compared to the ESP32 platform it is not as lightweight. It requires more power, it takes some time to boot. But when it comes to rapid development, there is nothing like the Raspberry Pi.

Louder Raspberry Pi

Louder Raspberry Pi is a top-of-the-range model that uses a modern highly capable TAS5805M DAC and is aimed to be paired with medium-to-large speaker systems. With 25W per channel stereo output, it packs a punch and can easily enliven living quarters or dorm rooms. It is highly efficient, but much more demanding for power when cranked, therefore it uses USB-C Power Delivery to pull up to 65W from the wall power adapter. It can be used both with Wi-Fi and Ethernet (to make sure bad Wi-Fi would not interrupt the stream)

Key features

	HiFi Raspberry Media Center	HiFi Raspberry Hat	HiFi-Plus Raspberry Hat (coming soon)	Loud Raspberry Media Center	Loud Raspberry Hat	Louder Raspberry Media Center	Louder Raspberry Media Center NOPD	Louder Raspberry Hat
Image
DAC	Single PCM5100A 32bit Stereo DAC	Dual PCM5100A 32bit Stereo DAC	Dual PCM5100A 32bit Stereo DAC working with TPA3110D2 D-Class amp	Dual I2S DAC MAX98357 with built in D-Class amp	Quadruple I2S DAC MAX98357 with built in D-Class amp	Stereo I2S DAC TAS5805M with built in D-Class amp	Stereo I2S DAC TAS5805M with built in D-Class amp	Stereo I2S DAC TAS5805M with built in D-Class amp
Output	2.1 VRMS Line level output -100 dB typical noise level	2x 2.1 VRMS Line level output -100 dB typical noise level	4x 25W (8Ω, 1% THD+N) at 22V; 4x 22W (4Ω, 1% THD+N) at 16V 2x 40W (4Ω, 1% THD+N) at 20V	2x 3W (8Ω); 2x 5W (4Ω)	4x 3W (8Ω); 4x 5W (4Ω)	2x 22W (8Ω, 1% THD+N); 2x 32W (4Ω, 1% THD+N) at 20V 1x 45W (4Ω, 1% THD+N) at 20V	2x 22W (8Ω, 1% THD+N); 2x 32W (4Ω, 1% THD+N) at 20V 1x 45W (4Ω, 1% THD+N) at 20V	2x 32W (8Ω, 1% THD+N) at 24V 1x 55W (4Ω, 1% THD+N) at 24V
RGB LED	yes	none	none	yes	none	yes	yes	none
IR input	yes	header only	none	yes	header only	yes	yes	header only
External relay driver	yes	none	none	no	none	yes	yes	none
Onboard Serial Bridge	yes	none	none	yes	none	yes	no	none
Ethernet	Wiznet W5500 SPI Ethernet	none	none	Wiznet W5500 SPI Ethernet	none	Wiznet W5500 SPI Ethernet	Wiznet W5500 SPI Ethernet	none
Powers from	5V USB-C power adapter (up to 1 A) Triple LP5907 3.3 V Ultra-Low-Noise LDO	5V from the host 5x LP5907 3.3 V Ultra-Low-Noise LDO	8..26V from external sourcepowering host (up to 3A cont.)	5V USB-C power adapter (up to 3 A)	5V from the host (up to 4A) or 5V from screw connector (powering host)	65W USB-C PD power adapter (25W/45W with limited power)	Up to 26V from external PSU	7..28V from external sourcepowering host (up to 3A cont.)
Mechanical dimensions (WxHxD)	88mm x 38mm x 100mm	65mm x 30mm x 15mm	70mm x 61mm x 20mm	88mm x 38mm x 100mm	65mm x 30mm x 20mm	88mm x 38mm x 100mm	88mm x 38mm x 100mm	65mm x 56mm x 20mm

Board Pinout

Audio

Peripheral

Peripheral (Louder)

How to use

You can use any distribution you like. To enable IR reader and Ethernet you need to add 2 lines to the /boot/config.txt

dtoverlay=gpio-ir,gpio_pin=23 dtoverlay=w5500

TAS5805M DAC is not supported by default Raspbian distribution, therefore some work needs to be done to enable it. Linked repo contains code and instructions on how to configure it. It will take you 5 minutes and one reboot.

Hardware

Front	Back	Back (NOPD)	PCB

Please visit hardware section of the project repo for board schematics and PCB designs. Note that PCBs are shared as multi-layer PDFs as well as Gerber archives.

Louder Raspberry power considerations

The Louder Raspberry can be quite a power-hungry device, simply using 5V over the USB-C is clearly not an option. You'd need a PD-enabled power adapter to run the board. Ideally, you should supply a 20V 3.25 Amp capable power source, common for modern laptops (Dell, HP, and Lenovo all tested and work perfectly). However, pretty much any 9V/12V/20V PD-enabled power adapter will work, most typically phone chargers with a quick charge option. The smallest of the family is a 25W model, which is plenty enough for both Raspberry Pi and DAC.

The interesting part was all the phone and laptop chargers I used for the test (around five different makes of each), sounded great, with no hissing, no popping. (Apart from the Apple ones, they didn’t work. Likely they have Apple-specific PD protocol). This is probably because modern devices have become so noise-sensitive that manufacturers have been forced to do good work on noise levels.

Tested and perfectly working models are (others may be available)

Model	Image
65W USB-C Lenovo ThinkPad Laptop Charger Replacement Power Adapter
65W 45W 20V 3.25A Type-C PD Laptop Charger
120W Gan Type-C PD Charger
45W Type-C PD Mobile Phone Wall Adapter

Because USB-PD is a bit of a Wild West in terms of standards, sometimes not everything goes as designed. Some people have run into this with power adapters that aren’t fully PD-standard compliant. In most cases, the worst that happens is the PD chip doesn’t trigger the 20V mode, so the Raspberry goes into the boot loop, not getting enough voltage on the 5V bus.

Louder Raspberry NOPD

The “hammer-style” solution I came up with is a new NOPD version of the Louder Raspberry that lets you use a barrel power jack to supply raw voltage directly. The catch? Standard 2mm pins can’t handle high currents, so I’ve gone with a 2.5mm pin instead — it’s a bit unusual but still common enough in the laptop world.

With this setup, you can supply more than the 20V limit of PD, giving you a bit more power for the speakers. You probably won’t hear much difference (thanks to the way human hearing works), but it could help larger speakers that need a bit more to really “open up." Other than that, the NOPD version works just like the PD version — no software changes are needed.

External voltage selection

The power adapter specs depend on the speaker you're planning to use. DAC efficiency is close to 100%, so just take the power rating of your speaker (say 2x10w), and impedance (say 8 ohms) and you'd need at least 9 volts rated at 1.2 amps per channel, round up to 3 total amps. Consider Pi itself drawing 5-10W of power when busy.

It is not recommended to go beyond the voltage your speakers can take, otherwise, the amp will blow your speakers in no time.

The absolute maximum voltage for the TAS5805M DAC is 30V, but it is not guaranteed to be thermally stable in this condition.