Having noted the speed improvement upgrading from a Pi B to a Pi 2, it seemed worthwhile to see what improvement a Pi 3 would make. The performance of this was quite usable with a Pi model B and much quicker with a Pi 2. Now, with a Pi3, the response is very slick indeed. I can't tell if the slight delay in updating the server's web page is down to the server or the browser.
At the same time, I thought I'd see how another DAC board behaved, since they're hardly prohibitively expensive. This time, I've gone back to HiFiBerry, with their DAC+ PRO. Sounds excellent to my ears, and a bargain at £32 or so, but then so did the IQ Audio Pi DAC+ previously used so I can heartily recommend either of those to anyone wanting to build a Raspberry Pi based audio player.
Final change is the addition of a small DC-DC converter so that it can be run from a 12V supply. It's the little board you can see nearly edge-on to the right of the green button. I have lots of 12V supplies, so this is a good way to put one of them to good use. The converter is a little board based on the MP1584 chip. It works at 1.5MHz so can be very tiny and still have very little ripple, and claims to be good for 3A, though I wouldn't want to run it at that current for long. I took a gamble of buying a lot of 10 of these, (which worked out at <50p each!) from China. I've used several of them now, and so far they have all worked. They seem to be a good option for powering a Raspberry Pi Zero from batteries - I'll be posting something about that soon. No, really, I made a new-year resolution to update this blog more often.
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