Is anyone using hardware buttons to control play/pause through the GPIO pins?

Pi MusicBox
1

I have built my Pi Zero running Pi MusicBox into an antique radio and can control the volume by using a digital rotary encoder (sending volume commands to Alsamixer). This is working fine.

Now I want to use the push/click function of the rotary encoder to play/pause Pi Musicbox. There are 2 separate pins on the rotary encoder just for the push/click function but I don’t know what software changes I need to make in Pi MusicBox or Mopidy to make this work.

Has anyone connected hardware push switches to the GPIO pins to control play/pause or maybe previous/next functions?

2

You don’t need to modify Mopidy to make that happen. Mopidy lets you control it either through the MPD protocol using e.g. the python-mpd client library in your GPIO-reading application or through HTTP or WebSocket. Check out the Mopidy docs for the details!

3

Thanks for answering. I guess that a gpio reading application is what I actually need. I found the Mopidy-TtsGpio add-on which seems to do what I need (and more): https://github.com/9and3r/mopidy-ttsgpio/blob/master/README.rst

I’ll try that.

4

I too have built a vintage radio retrofitted with a Raspberry Pi. There are 2 knobs on the radio. One is wired directly to the amplifier to control the volume, and I would like to use the other knob to select pre-defined audio sources like Spotify playlists, online radio (NPR) and podcasts. I believe this would be accomplished by using a rotary encoder and wiring this to GPIO on the Raspberry Pi. I could use some help with the software/programming to make this happen? Thank you!

5

So far I was only able to use a rotary encoder as digital volume controller. For other functions I’m still trying. Also check out this thread: Control With buttons or screen?

6

I’m in the middle of a project that uses GPIO to start specific playlists when a pushbutton is pressed. I have a python script running a loop that looks for GPIO inputs and then sends a few commands via os.system to mpc. I have it running on boot by adding a line to Cron, as detailed here: http://embeddedday.com/projects/raspberry-pi/a-step-further/running-python-script-at-boot/

Here’s my current code: http://pastebin.com/NFNpvjEH. onyeabor and katamari are 2 named playlists i have created. I wish there was a good way to create and manipulate playlists in one of the web extensions, but that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere i’ve seen yet.

7

I’m new to this whole thing, but i’m planning to use a Pi and Amp+ to supply a ceiling speaker in my new bathroom. I’m thinking that (on)-off spring-loaded light switch could do four things. Shot press would be on/off or play/pause, while long press would be vol+/vol-, kinda like an electronic dimmer. I guess i’ll have to learn some python scripting to pull this off… (unless it already exists?)