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Wireless Peppymeter on Pi: which I/O board should I use ?

I want to build a wireless PeppyMeter with my Linkplay A31 wireless audio receiver. I am trying to figure out how to connect my wireless audio receiver to the Raspberry Pi, and make this work.

Any help or advise is appreciated!

 

Background info
I have seen great DIY projects where people built their own VU-meter boxes. The VU-meters are visually represented on a display (so the meter itself is not hardware). Here’s two examples:

Often these projects are built with Volumio software and PeppyMeter plugins for the VU-meters. There is a wide collection of VU-meter visuals to choose from. Which makes it fun because changing to another VU meter of your like, is just a click away.

What I want to do
I would like to use PeppyMeter as active VU meter display, responding to the music I stream from any source. So it is all about the visual effect of the VU-meters. Therefor I am not implementing Volumio, as I do not want to build a streamer, or amplifier.

I already have a wireless multi-room audio system based on wireless audio receivers with the Linkplay A31 chipset, in this case the Arylic Up2Stream Mini.

With the 4Stream App I am able to create groups of audio receivers. So to make the PeppyMeter running on the Pi, respond to the music being streamed, I want to use another Linkplay A31 audio receiver as the audio source to the Raspberry Pi running PeppyMeter. That way I can combine the wireless speakers and the PeppyMeter in one group, responding to the same and to any music stream.(This also explaines why I can't use the WiFi of the Raspberry Pi and its AirPlay protocol, because I can't group that with my speakers and 4Stream)

Example of the group in 4Stream:

 

Configuration (?)
I think my configuration will look like this:

  • Raspberry Pi 3B, running the PeppyMeter software.
  • 9.1 inch widescreen display for the visual VU-meters.
  • Up2Stream Mini as wireless audio receiver
  • (???) An add-on board for the Raspberry Pi, that can handle the right way of I/O.

Visualized:

My questions

I am not sure what board or solution I need between my Up2Stream Mini audio receiver and the Raspberry Pi.

What I can tell is that the Up2Stream Mini has two audio signal outputs:

  • Mini-jack analog
  • S/PDIF 7-pin connector

The output format of the S/PDIF:

  • S/PDIF output with 44.1KHz, 16bits.
  • PCM 2 channels format.

 

Who can help me understand how to make the right connections to make this work?
And which I/O board to choose?

Any advice is welcome!

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