Start....

Here I shall occasionally write about the immense amount of time I have wasted creating a controller for my Sonos System using a Raspberry Pi mounted inside a furry radio that I got from off of ebay.

The motivating factor is - I like the Sonos a lot but I need knobs and buttons. The radio sits in my hallway and I can stab at it's physical protuberances to control what's playing around the house or plug things into it's exposed USB port without worrying my laptop.

The component parts are:

• A load of expensive Sonos speakers
• a Raspberry Pi running a pile of Python scripts which:
• Control the Sonos speakers, based on SoCo the simple Sonos controller
• Pull photos from my camera if one gets plugged in
• Push random music tracks to fill a usb stick if one gets plugged in
• Acts as NAS with a 64GB card, which is enough for all my music and photos.
• A cheap lcd photo keyring thing from 7DayShop. 
• dpf-ax - to control that
• A load of rotary encoders (cheap off ebay)
• Choose presets, set individual speaker volume.
• A potentiometer (cheap off ebay)
• Volume control
• On/off 
• Because the Pi does not have an analogue input, an i2c ADC module (cheap off... There's a pattern here)
• I ran out out of GPIO ports to manage all the encoders, so a i2c port extender to get me more inputs