Volumio tips

For my music server and streaming needs, I'm currently using Volumio 3 on a Raspberry Pi 3 with the official Raspberry Pi touchscreen.¹⁾ Here are some configurations tips I'm employing.

One of the biggest gripes about the Rasperry Pi is the poor out-of-the-box support it has for a power button. However, not a lot of people know that the Raspberry Pi OS does have almost out-of-the-box support for an OFF button. It's enabled using the platform's dtoverlay system.

To enable power-off button functionality using the default GPIO 3 as the shutdown signal, it's as simple as adding the line:

dtoverlay=gpio-shutdown

to /boot/userconfig.txt. Then wire up a momentary switch from GPIO 3 to GND. After a reboot, pushing the button should turn off the RPi.

If you add this to /boot/config.txt as many folks suggest, it'll still work until a system update rewrites that file. Adding it to /boot/userconfig.txt circumvents this problem.

However, you can't do this with the official touchscreen (and likely others), because the touchscreen uses GPIO 3. Instead, you need to specify a different GPIO pin. I chose GPIO 5 because there's a GND pin right next to it on the GPIO header.

dtoverlay=gpio-shutdown,gpio_pin=5

There's a good discussion about gpio-shutdown at stderr.nl.

For a kludgey power-on button, I use a short USB extension cable with a power switch. It's short to reduce the potential for voltage drop. After powering off with the power switch above, one push of the button removes power from the RPi, and another push brings it back, which initiates a boot. It's kludgey as hell, but it works.

Volumio 3 doesn't have an on-screen keyboard option or plugin for the touchscreen. However, the display is actually just a Chromium web browser display in kiosk mode, and this means in theory we should be able to use an on-screen keyboard for that.

Doing this is described here. TL;DR and in case that post goes down, the essence is:

• Connect a keyboard to your system and press ALT+HOME. This will open the Chromium browser.
• Search for “Chrome web store virtual keyboard”
• Install the extension Virtual Keyboard - Chrome Web Store

The link to Virtual Keyboard given in the post doesn't work. So, I tried installing some alternatives. But this resulted in a messages stating a newer version of Chrome was needed to install extensions. Asking:

$ chromium-browser --version

yielded

Chromium 92.0.4515.98 Built on Raspbian , running on Raspbian 10

As of this writing, Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspian) is based on Debian 12. This means Volumio is plodding along with an OS that's two long Debian generations old! In fact, Debian 10 will no longer be supported after June 30, 2024.

Just something to consider.