Pirate radio

is it possible to have the audio coming out of the phatdac but also use the vu meter and buttons of the phatbeat? :)

You are pushing data out to the I2S pins, so I don’t think it matters what chip(s) are ‘listening’ at the other hand. i.e, I suspect you will get sound from both at the same time if you have speakers hooked to the pHAT BEAT. Disconnect them, and the sound will come out of the pHAT DAC only.

ok thanks! imma sandwich the phatdac between the rpi and phatbeat using a long header, i shall report back!

I’ve just tried and that is exactly right, you can have both plugged into the Pi that way and choose which source (or both) you’d like to use as output by conmecting/disconnecting cables to your amp/speaker(s).

ok thats great! thanks a lot @RogueM :)

i still need to install the driver for phatdac too or? i only installed phatbeat during the installer.

no - they use the same dtoverlay, so if you have a functional pHAT BEAT then the only thing to do is fit the pHAT DAC onto the Pi (in place of, or in addition to).

Excellent thanks muchly! 😁

now if it could work out if a mini jack was connected to the phatdac and then disable the speaker that’d be ace!

there would be zero way to do that, that I can think of… again you are pushing data to a couple of pins on the GPIO to the amp onboard the pHATs: if you want sounds at all you need to push that data out.

… therefore I’m not sure how that could be achieved, even if could assess whether a jack connector has been inserted into the pHAT DAC. Well, at least not without some external circuitry that cuts the signal to the speakers.

Think I’ll just put a switch inline so I can just disable the speaker when
required then!

is there a way to get the vu meter of the phatbeat to just match the dynamics of the song played and not the set volume? so that the leds are always lively even at low volumes?

@gadgetoid has something in the pipeline to address this problem, but using the audio source dynamic is a very good idea… not sure it’s technically possible in the current implementation but Phil relishes challenges ;-)

… can you create a issue/request at https://github.com/pimoroni/pivumteter so we have a log somewhere?

will do that thanks :)

Corrected link for PiVuMeter on github is here: https://github.com/pimoroni/pivumeter