Topic: External DAC

This might be a long shot, but I thought it is worth a shot. My chumby sits in my office and keeps me company. I occasionally stream music via Pandora (can't believe this still works) and squeezebox. I got to thinking of adding some better speakers to my Chumby and have a pair of active speakers to use. I have this USB dac (Topping d10s) that uses the ES9018K2M chipset. I've been trying to see if I can get the chumby to recognize the dac, but not luck Doing a cat /proc/asound/cards only lists the default device.

My question is: has anyone tried this before? I've been trying to find information on which kernel or driver might have included this chipset since my laptop (running openSUSE) sees the topping just fine.

Re: External DAC

I don't recall if USB DACS have the required drivers installed, but even so, I think you'd also have to manually configure the audio subsystem to route the audio accordingly.  Most people just hook up powered speakers to the audio jack.  In the particular case of the chumby One, even though the built-in speaker only support mono, the audio jack supports full stereo, the rest of the chumby devices have stereo speakers.

Note that the Linux firmware in the chumby devices is quite old by today's standards, and for most of the devices, due to the amount of storage and RAM typical of an embedded device, not all drivers were included that you might find in a general desktop distribution.