Display Hat Mini & (old) PHAT DAC

Im currently building a music server, as close as I can get to a Brennan, which most likely will be using Moode audio. I will use a Raspberry PI zero 2 W, with a PHAT DAC (I bought years ago, but didnt realise my Raspberry pi didnt have enough gpio pins!!!).

The display hat mini looks like the ideal solution for my needs, but will it work simultaneously with the PHAT Dac?

This is a handy site for stuff like this.
Raspberry Pi GPIO Pinout

The pinout for the pHAT DAC is here,
pHAT DAC at Raspberry Pi GPIO Pinout
and Display Hat Mini is here,
Display HAT Mini at Raspberry Pi GPIO Pinout

I don’t see any conflicts at first glance.

Thanks, for the info

1 Like

Did you have any luck with this? I have the Pirdiate Audio Line out mini HAT which has both a DAC and a 240x240 LCD display. They both work fine, when run independent, howerver as soon as I start my display progam the music stops playing. I’m running snapclient to play the music, which I have running fine on similar DACs without the display. To display, I’m using the Pirate-audio sample code which Ive only moded to get the information I want on the display. As soon as I start this python program, the music stops. I’m suspicious of a conflict on the pirate-audio card.

This must be a problem of your program or the way you start your programs. I am using the Pirate Audio Speaker HAT successfully in one of my projects. The DAC is the same as in the line-out HAT.

My use case is an internet radio. I display the station logo while playing music. And I also run a web-server. All with a Pi-Zero-W and without any problems.

Maybe you can describe how you start your programs.

Snapclient is a c++ program, it is started automatically at boot by systemD. The display writer is a python program installed as a virtual environment. It stops the audio playing whether I start it explicitly for whether I use a systemD startup for it. It also stops when I use the example display program in the pimoromi GitHub rep so I don’t think it’s anything I’m doing in my display code.

One other thing to check. If you have an old Pirate Audio board, the GPIO20 was connected to one of the buttons (the one labelled ‘Y’). So make sure nothing configures this GPIO for button use.

In fact GPIO20 is PCM data-in, which is not used by the DAC. But since we don’t have a schematic, I am not sure if it is still connected or not. Or if it just causes trouble for the audio-driver, regardless of it’s connection status.

Even if you have a newer board, the software might be old and take control of GPIO20. So also check that.

Thanks, its a newer card but the SW in the pimoroni repo is quite old. I’m not explicitly using any of the buttons yet (that was the next phase) but its possibly messing with them.

I’ve ruled out snapclient as the cause. I disable it and used aplay to play some music through the DAC, as soon as I started the pirate display driver, the music stopped playing.