Smaller alternatives to RP?

Hi there!
I’ve recently bought a Bang & Olufsen Beosound 8 (iPhone dock) really cheap since nobody uses iPhone docks anymore:-)
The dock also has a Micro USB to connect to the internal DAC and Balena Sound works perfectly with Balena Sound! But I would like to integrate the device a bit more with the speaker and for that the RP4 is just too big and too power hungry.
Any suggestions for alternative SBCs which has enough power to run Balena Sound, a single USB output and is smaller and is less power hungry?
There are plenty out there (e.g. NanoPi NEO3-LTS) but I dont know Balena well enough to know how difficult it would be to deploy.
Thanks for any input:-)

Obviously it should have Wifi, so the NanoPi NEO3 makes no sense:-)

I have a couple RPi ZeroWs running balenaSound with a custom build. You have to strip it down to only the multi-room client, audio and sound-supervisor containers (it’s not enough to just stop the containers on a default build). My RPi ZeroW which also has a Pirate Audio line-out DAC /w OLED screen consumes about 260mA max while running. It bounces around between about 180-250mA at 5V.

In fact, both of my ZeroWs are slated to be integrated with the old Sony CD/iPod boom boxes they are currently attached to. I’m going to install them internal to the boomboxes, and power them from the battery/plug power, so I don’t have to keep them plugged into USB separately.

Also, check out this thread: Snapcast client container direct to audio output in multi-room

@tobiasruby if the Pi 4 Model B is too power hungry and too large, but the Pi Zero W is not powerful enough for you, I would recommend that you could use a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ as this is already supported with balenaSound and fits your requirements of WiFi/Bluetooth and a USB port.

It is definitely possible to get balenaSound working with other devices, but you would need to port the audio block, bluetooth block and some of the other aspects of balenaSound over to the device to get it fully working.

Thanks a lot! I went with your suggestion of Pi3 A+. Works really well.

@TobiasRuby funny you bring this up because I’ve been wanting to get balenaSound running on the Nano Pi (Neo Air) for the longest time but the device support is not quite there yet. It would make a super small and neat balenaSound device, it even has a cute little DAC HAT :heart_eyes: