I first saw the Dell / Kace M300 appliance mentioned in this thread and thought it was a cool little device at a great price on ebay ($14 shipped!). They are older armel based SBC's inside, circa 2011 but they do have 1Gbps ethernet and a SATA port.
Alpine doesn't have an armel port but they do have the scripts and framework built into their aports system for porting Alpine to different architectures, so I've been messing around with that on and off for the last couple of months. I now have a working base load and enough extra packages built that I was able to run squeezelite on it last night. Next up is LMS. I already have Perl built, it only took about 4 hours to compile natively on the M300. (!)
Picked up an Apple USB-C DAC dongle for $8 on Amazon (because of this write-up and comments, and the price) and used that for the squeezelite testing, connected with a USB-C to USB-A adapter. Working and sounds pretty good though I can hear occasional pops and clicks which has me a little concerned. I don't hear them when using the dongle in my laptop.
You can fit a 2.5" drive straight into the onboard sata connector but I elected to buy an extension cable and configured a two m.2 ssd software raid 1.
It's been fun and a little bit challenging. I'll let you know when I've got LMS up and running.
Alpine doesn't have an armel port but they do have the scripts and framework built into their aports system for porting Alpine to different architectures, so I've been messing around with that on and off for the last couple of months. I now have a working base load and enough extra packages built that I was able to run squeezelite on it last night. Next up is LMS. I already have Perl built, it only took about 4 hours to compile natively on the M300. (!)
Picked up an Apple USB-C DAC dongle for $8 on Amazon (because of this write-up and comments, and the price) and used that for the squeezelite testing, connected with a USB-C to USB-A adapter. Working and sounds pretty good though I can hear occasional pops and clicks which has me a little concerned. I don't hear them when using the dongle in my laptop.
You can fit a 2.5" drive straight into the onboard sata connector but I elected to buy an extension cable and configured a two m.2 ssd software raid 1.
It's been fun and a little bit challenging. I'll let you know when I've got LMS up and running.