Beeper for silent IPfire?

Hardware
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I like that IPfire on old PC beeps when connection goes down or up, it beeps when it shutdowns, etc.
Most PC motherboards have small speaker on motherboard, to help with troubleshooting boot issues.

I have built IPfire with RPI and it is silent because there is no beeper on RPI board. The same applies to other computers based on ARM architecture. Maybe even official appliances for IPfire are silent.

Is there any solution to this “missing beeper” issue? Maybe I can solder some module with beeper for RPI, maybe I can order a beeper device for USB. Any ideas, hints or experiences?

2

My official LWL Mini has a device that beeps when it goes up & down.

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3

Official appliances have a beeper.

Does your Rpi include an audio jack? I would just plugin a speaker /headphone in the audio jack.
USB speaker could work too.

what made you decide to use a Raspberry PI for IP fire?

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The beep function use the pcspeaker driver so Audio Jacks will only work if the mainboard route the pcspeaker to the soundcard. Usb soundcards will not work.

On arm the whole pcspeaker subsystem is not present!

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Great! It is not in the specification… :wink:

Device connected to audio jack will need an extra source of power, like a battery, or power from USB (could be noisy). Small USB speaker could be an acceptable solution. Once I will install MPFire add-on, I can use my RPI with USB speaker as n portable audio system too. IPfire has to be modified to use USB speaker for “beeper” notifications, some new code is needed and few sound files…

Several reasons:

  • I had spare RPI
  • I wanted to try IPfire on RPI
  • To have an extra IPfire for experiments
  • I will use it as travel router, to connect my devices to LTE network; IPfire will add DNS cache, HTTP proxy, update accelerator, secure DNS, etc. So far, I was using just LTE router from AliExpress and I beleive that RPI with IPfire can increase performance of LTE connectivity…
  • To compare performance of RPI with my gateway build from an old PC, RPI have lower power consumption, when performance and reliability will be good, maybe it can replace the old gateway; electricity is expensive these days… :frowning:
  • I plan to execute several experiments at home of my friend that is connected to ISP that hijacks DNS, so I was thinking about a really small IPfire that doesn’t take a lot of space in my backpack and that can be used for that test…
  • I have found project TorBox. I can swap microSDHC card and I will have another device for network experiments…

RPI with IPfire is not my main gateway at home, not yet… :wink:

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