Rune,
The Local display panel is interfaced to the CM3 - I've worked with the guys at RPi for over a year to open up the GPU core to allow two separated Video Frame buffers so we can have fully independent displays. The team at RPi have been proactive and now the dual frame buffer mode has been in Beta test for a good few months now and seems to work well
.
The MDAC2 / FDAC has to be operated WITHOUT any external device - hence the need for a front panel with user controls. For sure the Volumio session has access to the APi commands to also allow control of the MDAC2 hardware functions - but I have real troubles with the Volumio UI - responsiveness etc. it offers a poor user experience to an old timer like myself...not good and I'm just tired of trying to get things improved where others don't see a problem...
Life is too short to have to face the task of revamping the Volumio UI, so at this time I have no plans of adding the MDAC2 control UI to Volumio - although later we might find the means (software programmer) to create a MDAC2 / FDAC plugin for Volumio.
In public I'm not yet prepared to discuss some of the MDAC2 / FDAC more advanced features - but there is extensive graphics and UI required so I'm VERY happy that our Uwe here on PFM has offered to help with the graphical design
(Uwe - A MASSIVE thank you
)!!!
The MDAC2's front panel screen resolution is 1440 x 240, I'm not sure if album art can be formatted to fit on a screen this "Size", the aspect ratio is just wrong - but to be honest at this time I'm not thinking about streamer functions - but rather the basic hardware user controls (there will be user controls to operate the USB CDROM drive as a "Simple" CD player).
There is nothing to prevent full streamer operation from the front panel - just that it opens a huge Can of worms at this time and would really complicate the UI... That said I will not limit Uwe - If Uwe has better vision then myself then we will all be happy
Once the basic hardware UI is completed I think its natural there will be more features added over time
If your attending Munich
then you can talk with Micheal Angelo about adding the MDAC2 control layer - but he really needs to improve the basic streamer UI first without adding an extra layer of complexity !!!
I should point out that it will be possible to control the MDAC2's basic functions from Volumio UI - such as Volume level, inputs and possibly digital filters... but some of the other features will be quite graphics intensive.