The First Week of My Final Year Project

Right! It’s finally time for me to start my final year project! As you may or may not know, I’m currently in University studying for my final year. Part of the final year involves working on a project / dissertation that will make up 35% of my final mark. I’ve just finished all of my taught units and exams so it’s now time to start working on my project!

What is my project on?

When I joined the university I originally opted for the degree title Forensic Computing and Security however, the final year project must be related to the degree title chosen and I honestly couldn’t think of any (and didn’t really want to do any) projects related to this degree title. I therefore moved to the general title of Computing, this opened up an array of different project areas that I could choose from and I decided that I wanted to do something related to Raspberry Pis. I’ve also always been interested in home automation and multi-media solutions so decided to combine this interest with my interest in Raspberry Pis to create a Low-Cost Multi-Room Streaming Audio Solution!

The idea behind this project will be to have a solution for listening to audio seamlessly between rooms in an home (or possibly business) environment that makes use of existing audio systems (that have a line in). Each raspberry Pis will be nominated as either a master or a slave and the audio will be streamed over the network to each device. If I have time I will also be looking at making this stream Bluetooth audio and audio sent via Airplay & UPnP.

When will this be completed?

The hand-in date for this project is mid May, so I will hopefully have this completed long before this time. Once authorised by the University I will also be releasing the code under an open source licence of some sort (something GPL related probably) and this will probably be available on my GitHub. If you’re interested in this project and want to contact me in any way, just send an email through my contact form.

Why am I blogging about this?

I thought it might be fun to write about how my project is going and will provide me with a record of how things where progressing. It may also be an interesting read for others!

I’ll write about my progress, what’s new and any major blockers or breakthroughs.

Wish me luck!