Project Description

This project is for everyone who loves music and enjoys building things themselves. With just a spare Raspberry Pi and any reasonable audio HAT or USB DAC, you can turn it into a high-quality, headless music endpoint capable of playing audio via Tidal Connect or Bluetooth streaming.

Sure, there are ready-made devices like active speakers or the WiiM Amp - but here we want to create our own open, SUSE-based alternative using SUSE Linux Micro 6.2.

Goals

By the end of the project, you will have a power-on-and-forget music endpoint that:

• Boots a minimal, immutable SUSE Linux Micro 6.2 system
• Exposes itself as a Tidal Connect target
• Supports Bluetooth A2DP for general audio streaming
• Runs fully headless and reliably in everyday usage

The goal is to create something practical, reproducible, and usable for real households - not just a demo.

Required Components

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 (AArch64) – runs SUSE Linux Micro and containers
• SD card – flashed with the SLE Micro 6.2 Raw Disk Image
• HiFiBerry AMP2 or similar HAT / USB DAC – audio output hardware

Software

• SUSE Linux Micro 6.2 (released November 4, 2025)
• ALSA utilities – low-level sound card access
• BlueZ + BlueALSA – Bluetooth A2DP stack (details to be refined during the project)
• Podman + podman-compose – container runtime
• Tidal Connect container – community-maintained image bundling the proprietary TC binaries
• Some glue logic around audio routing, service startup, and user experience

Background Story

I’ve been running Raspberry Pi audio endpoints at home for years. When my kids were small and couldn’t read yet, they used Squeezelite as part of my smart-home setup, playing playlists I prepared for them.

Now they’ve grown up, have their own smartphones, and want to play the music they like - ideally directly from modern streaming services. Tidal Connect is perfect for this, and Bluetooth streaming covers everything else.

So in 2025 it’s time to modernize those old audio boxes. I want to rebuild the solution properly on SUSE Linux Micro, create a clean and reproducible setup, and hopefully make it easy for others to build their own self-hosted open audio devices.