I just learned aboud AmpliPi today and I am sold on the controller box. I am however not sold on the NSPanel wall box. I want to have physical buttons for at absolute minimum volume/play/stop/pause, but preferably also next/previous. This is a hard requirement on my part. Having an additional screen to display current source and meta information is fine and good, but it cannot be the only interface.
Some years ago I started looking into multiroom audio, and at that time the best solution I found was a Niles Audio system, specifically because of their keypads which fitted what I wanted.
Niles Audio Solo-6 MD
Niles Solo-6 IR Keypad
These have been discontinued for some time (one of many good arguments for selecting a solution like AmpliPi…), and they would not be able to communicate with anything other than a Niles Audio system.
I waugely remember comming across some other keypad box some time later that was similar in design but had its interface open with a specification so they could be communitated with with your own DIY solution if you wanted, but I cannot remember what it was.
So does any of you have any suggestion to alternative wall mount boxes that features keys?
Thank you for checking. I dug around on my older computers and found some documents downloaded in 2017 about the solution I was thinking of which had keypads and available documentation of how to communicate with them.
“When used with RTI’s two-way compatible control processors, the RKM-1+ can communicate bi-directionally with almost any multi-zone receiver or distributed audio system, providing users with feedback on processes such as power status, selected sources, and volume levels.”