BeoSound 5 without BeoMaster 5

Hi all Beo enthusiasts,

over the years and especially lately I was getting several personal messages about this old thread here from 2015. I was talking about using the BS5 (still a nice piece of art) without the pretty dated BM5 whose motherboards are slowly failing now (mostly leaking capacitors which can be easily repaired btw) and of course it also does not support any modern streaming solutions. 

I have no clue where we might or might not end up with this thread. I just really dislike the possibility that BS5s might not be getting used anymore or even worse scenarios. It's really too beautiful for this.

Maybe let's start simple and have a look into the USB communication between BS5 and BM5. The video signal, power supply and the IR receiver are self explanatory. 

Back in the days I already reverse engineered the communication and wrote a proof-of-concept interfacing software with a very basic UI for it. Of course I didn't store this properly and now cannot find it anymore. Nevertheless it's pretty straightforward HID device. I'll revisit it and do a proper write up in the coming days.

While I personally have my strengths in electronic hardware engineering and low-level software (doing both professionally) maybe we can find some people here being good at frontend UI programming for embedded Linux systems. So ideally we end up with a small blackbox replacing the BM5 in stand-alone setups.

What do you all think about this?

Interesting idea and I must admit that I am really pleased with my BS5, especially after the ssd upgrade.

My concern here would be how you would be able to integrate the unit with ML. If possible.

If you go one step further it should be easy enough re-using the internal ML / PL / power management board of the BM5. As far as I remember it's just connected via USB internally.

In general the hardware aspect is not a problem here. That's simple enough. If you want to replace the BM5 it's mainly a question of software. Especially for the UI and ML if you want to continue using it.

Attached a proof-of-concept written in python to read out the BS5 controls. Nothing special. 
It will plot the absolute values for the bar lever and the buttons. Additionally it will show the step count since last read for the front wheel and the volume ring (incremental encoders).

It's not much but I just wanted to put this somewhere as people kept asking me.
The picture shows the result for pressing the GO button and releasing it again. Typically those are all hex values but the library seems to translate them to integers by default...

Download bs5-hid.py

Excellent. Thanks for sharing.

I thought there was more to it but it seems indeed rather straightforward.