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Connections
How the panel meets the player, and the one cable you might run.
The panel is a client of the player over the LAN, as the Volumio apps on a phone are. It joins your Wi-Fi (2.4 or 5 GHz on the ESP32-C5; 2.4 GHz on the C6), finds the player by mDNS (the player advertises itself as _Volumio._tcp on port 3000 under its own name), polls the player's state over its REST interface, sends transport and volume the same way, and fetches the album art. Where mDNS does not reach, an address typed in works instead.
Nothing is installed on the player, and no cable runs between the player and the panel. The panel takes 5 V over its USB-C port from any charger or from a USB port on the player, or runs from a 3.7 V battery on its battery header.
For a player and a panel that have no network between them, the board's UART header (J6) can take a serial link from the Pi's 40-pin header. Three wires, both sides 3.3 V logic:
| Pi pin | Pi signal | Wire | J6 pin | Board signal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | GPIO 14, TXD | Pi out, board in | 1 | RXD, GPIO 12 |
| 10 | GPIO 15, RXD | board out, Pi in | 2 | TXD, GPIO 11 |
| 6 | GND | common ground | 4 | GND |
Leave J6 pin 3 (3V3) unconnected: the board has its own 3.3 V regulator and takes its power over USB-C. On the Pi the serial port must be free of a login console. J6 is the board's UART0, its serial console by default; firmware for a serial link moves the console to the USB port.
This link is not built yet; it is the third item in the project's order (the Wi-Fi companion first, voice second), for a named no-network need.
The board's I2C header (J5) is the board's own bus: the touch controller, the IO expander, the audio codec, the IMU, the clock and the humidity sensor all hang on it and the ESP32 is its master. It is a place to add a peripheral to the board, not a link to another computer. Joining it to the Pi's I2C would put two masters and six devices on one bus with the pull-up resistors in parallel. The serial link above is the wired option.
The Boards page has the pin map behind these. Pin 1 is as Waveshare's schematic numbers it; check the silkscreen before wiring. The box holds one SH1.0 12-pin and two SH1.0 4-pin cables.