Wallpanel alternative to NSPanel?

Hardware
1

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?

2

I looked a little bit into this and was not able to find a keypad that would be simple to integrate with AmpliPi.

One alternative keypad was made by one of our original Kickstarter supporters: GitHub - kjk2010/AmpliPi-POE-Touchscreen: POE-powered touchscreen controller for AmpliPi. Although it does not have any keypad input, the design could be adapted to have physical buttons.

We do not have any current plans to create a physical keypad. Our plans could be changed if there is sufficient interest though.

3

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.

It was NuVo

where there exist various documentation with communication protocol information (like https://kb.homeauto.com/redirfile.asp?id=687&SID= , GitHub - CommandFusion/Nuvo: Module for controlling Nuvo systems with CommandFusion , http://www.sirkom.com/datos/doc_productos/archivo43/I8G-E6G_SerialControlProtocol_0_7.pdf and
http://www.autonomic-controls.com/documents/mcs30/mcs_3.0_IP_Control_Protocol.pdf) although the options were keypad only, and not combination of keypad and display. And the company seems to be less open and supportive now, so apparently not something to
depend on.

However searching a bit now I found a couple of new alternatives solutions similar to Solo-6:

Both discontinued products. But then I also stumbled upon Remote Technologies Incorporated (RTI) RKM-1+ keypad:

which is still a current product, and from RC News: RTI Ships RKM-1+ Keypad it says

“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.”

which sounds really promising.