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Turn your BeatBox into an All-in-one Machine with a Raspberry Pi!

Soldering - required for an optional step, total time around 2 hours (not counting wait time for 3D printing)


The BeatBox was created with portability in mind. Even before the creation of the BeatBox, I've always wondered if things would have been different if us beatmakers had the power of that one shirtless acoustic guitar guy on every college campus. As a result, we built the battery and speakers into the BeatBox, but the sad truth is you'd still need your mobile device to be tethered for the portable experience. I wondered, does that really have to be the case?


And it hit me - couldn't I just make this myself? Stone Cold Steve Austin always taught me since a very young age, DTA (Don't Trust Anyone), I have to take matters into my own hands. Thanks to the BeatBox's modular design, adding a Raspberry Pi unit to drive the BeatBox is a breeze. I put together this little tutorial for you for the ultimate all-in-one portable performance BeatBox unit.



Note that since a lot of the steps require waiting, you can work on them concurrently, such as 3D printing the parts or waiting for components to ship.


An adequate hobbiest like myself had a lot of the materials used laying around, but I listed everything just to make sure. Got some affiliate links here as well.


Materials:

  • Raspberry Pi 4 - https://amzn.to/3wiHmqp

  • Waveshare 7in LCD Touchscreen - https://amzn.to/36hFx2n

  • Micro SD card w/ Adapter (8GB at least. I used a 32GB class 10) - https://amzn.to/3yAAB4v

  • MicroUSB Cable - https://amzn.to/3i4Aec2

  • HDMI to Micro HDMI Cable (there should be an adapter included in the screen we suggested above)

  • USB Flash Drive

  • USB Mouse and Keyboard (for setting up Android on the Raspberry Pi initially, you don't need this after)

  • 4x M3-6mm Screws

  • 4x M3-10mm Screws

  • 2x M4-18mm Flat Head Philips’s Screws

  • 2x M4 Hex Nuts

  • JST Wire Terminals (Optional)

  • Colored Electrical Wire (Optional: At least two different colors for your own sanity)

Tools Used:

  • Laptop

  • Philip’s Screwdriver

  • Creality Ender 3 Printer

  • Wire Crimp and Soldering Iron (only required for internally powering the Raspberry Pi, can be skipped if you choose to power the Pi with an external battery bank)

Step 1: Software


Go to https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi4/LineageOS18/ and download that latest version of Lineage. This is a publically available Android 11 build for the Raspberry Pi. The page also served as a great resource where I found a lot of the information for troubleshooting any problems I ran into. I’ll try to cover the most common ones I ran into here on this post, but if any other should arise for you, I highly recommend reading through this page.






Next, scroll down to the FAQ section and find OpenGApps, or follow this link (https://sourceforge.net/projects/opengapps/files/arm/test/). Open the "20210130" folder and download “open_gapps-arm-11.0-pico-20210130-TEST.zip”. This allows you to access the Google Play Store once Android is running on the Raspberry Pi. In case they release an update in the future, you can go with the latest version of the build. Just make sure you download the file that says pico in the name.


Step 2: Flashing SD Card and USB Stick

If you have never used a raspberry pi before, follow this link to download the Raspberry Pi Imager. This is what is used to flash the Lineage Image to the SD card. Once that is downloaded and installed, you should see something like this: