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Volumio tips
For my music server and streaming needs, I'm using Volumio 3 on a Raspberry Pi 3 with the official Raspberry Pi touchscreen. Here are some configurations tips I'm employing.
Power-off button
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.
Power-on button
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.
On-screen keyboard
Volumio 3 doesn't have an on-screen keyboard option or plugin when using a connected touchscreen. However, the display is actually a Chromium web browser display in kiosk mode, and this means we can use an on-screen keyboard for that.
One option is described here. In case that post goes down and/or TL;DR, 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
That said, the link to Virtual Keyboard doesn't work. So, I tried an alternative.