SSD

Raspberry Pi Car Audio System

June 23, 2014 by Jack Zimmermann 13 Comments

My Raspberry Pi Car Audio Player

A lot of people are using the excellent Linux microcomputer Raspberry Pi and install it in their cars. Usually, they use a color screen that is touch sensitive, being able to play back video and music. But I’m only interested in high-quality audio playback, being able to have all my CDs in lossless FLAC format for optimal sound quality. So a 16×2 LCD with some buttons is plenty. I now have a working system (but not yet installed in my car.) here’s a description of how I’ve built it. Most of the installations I’ve seen the use of the audio out from the Raspberry Pi, but it’s only 11-bit and sounds like crap. I want to use an external DAC, and you can get that to work in XBMC, but only menu and music output, not films. There are some HDMI to audio converters, but I’ll instead use a quality USB DAC.

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Raspberry Pi Car Computer

May 17, 2013 by Jack Zimmermann 2 Comments

Update: You can find my latest update on the progress of my Raspberry Pi Car Audio System here.

I’m working on a Raspberry Pi as a music player in my car. I’m putting all my music on a SSD disk in lossless FLAC. I’ve already got hold of a 2×16 character LCD with six button from Adafruit that only uses two pins for communication with I2C. It’s easy to program and it has four different background colors.

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Web server with SSD disk

May 22, 2012 by Jack Zimmermann 3 Comments

My old web server built on old spare parts had a hard disk crash a month ago. So I had to put it up on my BlueHost account while waiting to get hold of a new disk. I decided to try out a SSD disk, so I got hold of a 60gb IBM SSD disk. Without any optimizations, it can now handle double the traffic! I’ll continue to optimize tomorrow to get the most out of it. I’m doing an article on how to set up a LAMP server on Ubuntu Linux for WordPress with all the stuff needed to get W3 Total Cache, APC and other stuff working, because I can’t find a good article that describes everything. I will start writing on it tomorrow.

Speed up MacBook Pro by installing a SSD disk

February 25, 2012 by Jack Zimmermann 1 Comment

SSD drive and extra disk for more speed, instead of DVD drive in MacBook Pro

Changing out your hard disk in your MacBook Pro to an SSD disk is a great way of increase the speed of your machine. And I’m not talking about a little faster, where talking about the feeling of getting a new machine. But a SSD is still expensive and are limited when it comes to storage size. So it’s not going to be able to replace your big standard disk. The solution is simple. Replace your internal disk with a SSD disk, then remove your DVD drive and install a large 2.5″ disk for your bigger files. Replace your DVD? Yes, do you use it anymore? I’m not. You need a special bracket to be able to install the extra disk, so you have to buy it. But many installation kits for replacing the DVD player also includes an external USB case to install the DVD into, so you still have access to one if you need. I bought my installation kit from Ebay for next to nothing, but didn’t include the case. As I said, I’m a modern Mac user and don’t use DVD. Hint, hint.

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