If you have been experiencing audio skips or stuttering on a Raspberry Pi, then I may have a solution for you.

For background, I use an older Raspberry Pi as an audio player, using mpd as an audio server, MPD Remote on my Android Phone, and Sonata on my Xubuntu Laptop.

It was working fine for a long time, but then it started skipping audio every 10 or 20 seconds, regularly.

Last Monday, I gave a talk at the KWLUG on Microcontrollers and The Internet of Things (IoT).

It covered topics such as: how microcontrollers are different from 'computers', the Arduino and Arduino IDE, the ESP8266 and ESP32 WiFi enabled microcontrollers, and using MicroPython on them. Also covered the very low cost STM32 ARM Cortex microcontroller.

A while back, I completed a port of the open source OnStep Telescope Controller firmware to the STM32 Blue Pill ARM Cortex M3 32-bit MCU. Later, Dave Schwartz and myself designed a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) that makes building a controller a far easier task than before.

Here is a video of the completed PCB.

Over the winter, I worked with Howard Dutton, the author of OnStep Telescope Controller, to make it work with the low cost STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontrollers. This involved writing a hardware abstraction layer (HAL), so adding different architectures in the future would not be too hard, as it was.

Yesterday, I gave a talk for the KWLUG on Incremental Backup For Linux. This is targeted towards home networks or small businesses using Linux, although I touched a bit on some enterprise considerations and technologies.

The solution I use relies on the dump and restore utilities for the ext4 filesystem, along with rsync from laptops.

The slides are attached below, as PDF. The meeting was recorded, and the video should appear here shortly.