Monoprice offers a very reasonably priced
six source/six zone amp for whole house audio applications.
However, the wall mounted controllers are really bare bones and offer nothing in the way of track information or other metadata.
So what I was wondering... how hard it would be to cook up something like the "Id Pi" with a touch screen (or any screen really, if there's some hard buttons). Some example screens are here:
https://www.adafruit.com/categories/160Ideally the Raspberry Pi + screen would be wall mountable (via a standard double or single gang electrical box), powered using PoE, and have at least one "hard" button for power toggle. For ideal usability I'd like to see 5 or 6 hard buttons: power toggle, vol up & down, next "track"/previous "track", and "next source" but that may be a tall order.
The audio output of the Pi would be optional. In my situation I'd rather this Id Pi variant be used as a remote to control JRiver Media center running on a system located next to the Amp powering the zones.
(Apologies if this has already been discussed here. I tried searching this forum for "id pi" but I got zero hits.)