Headphone Amp for Raspberry Pi with fbtft

Support
9

Regarding fbconsole support for Pirate Audio hardware running raspbian buster, I finally found something that works. Note: This does not appear to work on the raspberrypi os version of buster using the 5.x kernel but it does work for 4.19.x kernels running on raspbian buster and stretch.

  1. Install “buster-lite” and run “sudo apt update” but DO NOT run “sudo apt upgrade”
  2. run “sudo raspi-config” and enable “SSH”, “SPI”, and “I2C” within “Interfacing Options” then reboot.
  3. login as the pi user.
  4. run “wget
    https://gist.githubusercontent.com/hgroll/2731ae6d05350df663b123615f765bf5/raw/f8fe3829136296c20ba670dcd572e8a5c60da995/pidi-overlay.dts”
  5. run “dtc -@ -I dts -O dtb -o pidi.dtbo pidi-overlay.dts”
  6. run “sudo cp pidi.dtbo /boot/overlays/”
  7. edit “/boot/config.txt” and add the line “dtoverlay=pidi”
  8. edit “/boot/cmdline.txt” and append " fbcon=map:10 fbcon=font:VGA8x16" (with the beginning space) to the 1st line after the word “rootwait”
  9. run “sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup” then select “UTF8”, “Guess optimal…”, “Let the system select…”, “8x16”, “Ok”
  10. run “sudo reboot”

The pirate audio hat should come up in fbconsole mode.
It will break if you try to “apt upgrade” but at least it’s running in buster (4.19.x).

I found the information at the following url:
https://github.com/pimoroni/pirate-audio/issues/15