Let the SONOS hacking begin!

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I always wanted a networked multi-room audio solution as you can easily see here and here and here and here. Now it seems I’ve finally found something that integrates very well into our music listening habits and our infrastructure. And on top of that it turned out to be highly hackable.

I’ve went with SONOS for that multi-room solution. After trying two speakers for two rooms I’ve invested the budget into the full-house solution (not all speakers on below picture). And finally everything is as I always wanted.

Be warned: If you buy one speaker, you will definitly buy more.

IMG_0367

So what’s in those boxes? Besides beautiful and high-quality speakers there’s a 250 Mhz linux powered computer inside each speaker. It got 64Mbytes of memory and wireless adapters to span it’s own wireless mesh network (hidden by default).

Each speaker on it’s own can be controlled and accessed through the SONOS controller applications (Windows/Mac/iOS/Android) or through several tools that open up new possibilities.

Screen Shot 2014-03-22 at 17.52.10

There will be more articles coming on the topic of hacking SONOS, adding functionality and using it for things not officially planned for by the manufacturer. Joy!

Update:

Source 1: http://splok.org/sonos_interface

How to install NodeJS and NPM on the RaspberryPi without getting “Illegal Instruction” error messages

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I tried a couple of times to compile NodeJS on the RaspberryPi and failed miserably. It not only takes ages to compile NodeJS on the Pi. After the successful compile and install run most of the time running it just results in an error message “Illegal Instruction” or “Ungültiger Maschinencode”.

Now there’s a pretty easy way to do that on your own. Run these commands:

wget http://node-arm.herokuapp.com/node_latest_armhf.deb

After the download is finished successfully you can install it by running this as root:

sudo dpkg -i node_latest_armhf.deb

This will have installed a relatively new NodeJS built as well as NPM on your RaspberryPi. Don’t panic when NPM is slower than you would expect… just be patient.

Enjoy!