Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
Okay, it turns out that there was a lot of hidden magic on the SOMA Connect image that was infeasible to try to migrate/clone over myself, both due to dependencies on how the old-ass Raspbian image is setup in terms of networking, and a whole bunch of random/hidden scripts that do who-knows-what. So I decided to take a different approach, and modify the SOMA Connect image instead.
Last time I had a sorta-working shairport-sync configuration on my Raspberry Pi, but I didn’t have the SOMA Connect hardware actually working, and I had to make a bunch of compromises in order to get things to even try to start up without reimaging to the 32-bit Raspbian operating system.
Well, somehow the filesystem got corrupted and the device was refusing to boot, so I figure this is as good a time as any to document how I got things working in a much nicer way.
I’ve reorganized my bedroom and as part of it I decided to finally address the ongoing issues with my audio setup in there. I have an old AirPort Express which I was using as an AirPlay receiver so that I could play music and podcasts and such on the (rather nice) hi-fi speakers, but it’s been super unreliable as of late, and even when it does remain connected, it generates random popping noises on the speakers — not great when I’m trying to sleep!
So anyway I was looking up various aftermarket AirPlay receivers, and most of them are pretty expensive, but then I realized that there’s probably a way of receiving AirPlay on a Raspberry Pi, and yes, there is, and then just as I was about to look for used Raspberry Pis to install this on, I remembered I already have a Raspberry Pi, in my bedroom, in the very same nightstand I would be putting a new one in: because I have SOMA’s older smart shades which use a rebadged Raspberry Pi as their Bluetooth-to-HomeKit bridge.
And the SOMA Connect image is just running Linux (specifically Rasbian 10) and some proprietary software.
