This is my first pass at building myself a small, portable, decent sounding digital audio player based around a raspberry pi zero and some additional hardware along with a 3d printed case.
My goal is to build myself a music player I can carry as my primary listening device that sounds good, can carry a large portion of my music library, has a simple user interface, has a more powerful backend interface, and does not cost a fortune.
For this first iteration, I have selected three HATs - a display hat with d-pad and utility buttons, a digital audio board, and an uninterruptible power supply board with battery. The selections of the hardware chosen was based more on availability at the time of ordering than any in-depth research in to the pros and cons of each device amongst its peers. As it turns out, there are a few GPIO pin assignments that two or more of the HATs will be trying to use for their own devices (ha) so I'll have to bodge that wire when I get to it.
The other hardware consists of a raspberry pi zero w board, a 32gb micro sd card, a micro-usb to usb-a plug cable, and a 256gb usb flash drive. The flash drive will be the music library storage and will be externally accessibly, should I want to remove it to modify the library contents on a system with a faster storage bus going for it. also, I could carry around a tiny fake pleather cassette carrying case that had a couple dozen usb flash drives in it and have literally terabytes of high quality music at my disposable. tres chic!