Phatbeat installation issues

Support
1

Hi - new to RPi and Pimoroni. I’ve spent a long time today trying to get a Phatbeat to work on my RPi 3 running a freshly installed Raspbian with all updates. This got off to a bad start when the “get started” URL on the package (pimoroni.com/phatbeat) returned a 404 error! Anyway, I found the getting started article and followed it to the letter but apart from some nasty pops from the speaker got no sound. Instead I kept getting the following error message when trying speaker-test

speaker-test 1.0.28

Playback device is default
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 1 channels
Using 16 octaves of pink noise
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy

After considerable searching I found a thread here
https://forums.pimoroni.com/t/pirate-radio-pops-but-no-music/6830 which suggested stopping the pulseaudio service. Hey presto, it worked, but there are a lot of nasty pops which may cause speaker damage but in any case are unpleasant.

Is there a fix for this please? And could you make this clear in the getting started article please so others don’t have to suffer!

Thanks
Richard

2

The Pulse Audio service is there to fix the pops, by keeping the audio device running and preventing an issue where the Pi doesn’t output sane i2s signals.

We’ve since implemented a hardware fix, though. When/where did you get your pHAT BEAT?

3

Hi, many thanks for the prompt reply. I bought it online last week from ModMyPi. It looks like an ideal solution for a project I’m working on :)

4

@Gadgetoid - presumably this is old stock then is it? Should I contact ModMyPi for a modified replacement or is the mod something I can do myself?