Rio Receiver

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The Rio Receiver was a home stereo device for playing mp3 files stored on your computer's hard drive over an Ethernet or HomePNA network. It was later rebranded and sold as the Dell Digital Audio Receiver.

As a linux-based device, it became popular among the Linux hacking community.

The hardware consisted of a Cirrus Logic 7212 CPU (ARM720T at 74 MHz), 1Mx32 (4 MB) of EDO DRAM, and either 512k x 16 or 256k x 16 (1 MB or 0.5 MB) of NOR flash used to boot. Audio output used a Burr-Brown PCM1716 DAC that drove line outputs, the headphone jack, and a Tripath class-D digital audio amp for speakers. Network connections were via either a Cirrus logic 8900A (10MBit ethernet) or a Broadcom HomePNA 10 Mbit/s chipset; if no ethernet link was seen at boot time, the unit tried HomePNA. UI was via a 128x64 pixel monochrome LCD with an EL backlight, a rotary control with push, several buttons and IR remote support.

The unit booted via a 2.2 linux kernel in flash which DHCP'ed and then tried to find a server to NFS mount its root filesystem from; a new kernel was loaded from this NFS mount allowing units to run new kernels by simply power cycling them.