Setting up Wi-Fi on the Pi

Running an Ethernet cable through the Pi is a little bit unrealistic for this use. Hence, we will connect the Pi to a wireless network. Since not all Wi-Fi adapters work well with the Pi, it is a good idea to check the list of the supported devices (http://elinux.org/RPi_USB_Wi-Fi_Adapters) before purchasing one specifically for this project.

Firstly, we will make sure that we have all the Wi-Fi tools installed using the following command:

sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant wireless-tools

There is a good chance that these packages will already be installed on Raspbian, but it is a simple step to check beforehand.

It is likely that you already know the service set identifier (SSID) or name of the wireless network you want to connect to, but if not, or just to check whether it is being picked up by the Wi-Fi adapter, use the following command to get a list of all the Wi-Fi networks available in the range:

sudo iwlist wlan0 scan | grep ESSID

You will get output similar to the following:

Now that we know the name of the network we want to connect to, we can go ahead and add an entry in the wpa_supplicant configuration file, which contains the connection details for the network. This can be edited by the nano text editor, using the following command:

sudo nano /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

At the end of the file, add the following lines and replace SSID and PASSWORD with SSID and the password for your wireless network:

network={
  ssid="SSID"
  psk="PASSWORD"
  key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}

Once the lines have been added to the file, save the changes, exit nano, and reboot the Pi using the following command:

sudo reboot

Once the Pi has booted, SSH back into it and make sure that the Pi has a Wi-Fi connection, using the following command:

ifconfig

If the configuration is successful, you will see output similar to this, which shows an active Ethernet (on 192.168.0.2) and a Wi-Fi (on 192.168.0.18) connection:

After this, you should be able to SSH in the Pi via its Wi-Fi IP address and disconnect the Ethernet cable.

Running squeezelite as a daemon

Since we want the Pi to be ready to stream music without having to do anything other than apply power to it, we need a way to launch squeezelite when the Pi boots; this time, we will look at another way of doing this, using a daemon.

A daemon is a program that runs in the background and is not directly visible to the user; because of this, it is often used for applications such as servers.

In our case, we will use the start-stop-daemon utility to create a daemon that will start squeezelite on boot. We will do this by writing a shell script and placing it in the /etc/inti.d directory:

#!/bin/bash

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          squeezelite
# Required-Start:
# Required-Stop:
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: Squeezelite client
# Description:       Logitech media server client
### END INIT INFO

DAEMON_USER=pi
PIDFILE=/var/run/squeezelite.pid
DAEMON=/usr/bin/squeezelite-armv6hf

DAEMON_OPTS="-n Pi -a 160"

do_start()
{
  start-stop-daemon --start --background --pidfile $PIDFILE --make-pidfile --user $DAEMON_USER --chuid $DAEMON_USER --startas $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS
}

do_stop()
{
  start-stop-daemon --stop --pidfile $PIDFILE --retry 10
}

case $1 in
  start)
    do_start
    ;;
  stop)
    do_stop
    ;;
  restart)
    do_stop
    do_start
    ;;
  *)
    ;;
esac

Make the script executable and move it to the /etc/init/d directory:

sudo chmod a+x squeezelite
sudo mv squeezelite /etc/init.d/squeezelite

Finally, use the following command to update the list of daemons:

sudo update-rc.d squeezelite defaults

To ensure that the daemon is working properly, try to start squeezelite by executing:

sudo service squeezelite start

Check whether the process is running:

ps aux | grep squeeze

This should give you output similar to the following:

The preceding output shows that the squeezelite process is running; this can also be verified if you attempt to stream music in the player.