My i2cdetect found the two i2c addresses for the piano hat on a Pi4B.
My Piano Hat is a green one though? I don’t know if that matters or not? The only number I can find on it is F004250. Its the one you gave me a while back. Other than being green it looks the same as the black one on your product page.
Phil I have the 07-10 Buster image installed on a Pi 3B+. I can try my piano hat on that Pi if you want? I think Jack has already done that but I have no problem giving it another go.
I did give Buster a try on the 3B+ and had issues yesterday: Piano and Drum HATs don't work properly on Pi 4 - Pi 4 at fault?
The LEDs still lit up, but touch didn’t register correctly. So I’m completely baffled now about whether it’s a hardware or software issue!
The touch works sort of kind of. It’s just the sound part that didn’t work for me. The LED’s lit up when I touched a touch pad, but depending on what example it was only some keys produced sound or no keys produced any sound. And a couple of the LED’s were mismatched to the buttons. As near as I can tell the touches get detected, but something goes wrong after that. I had analog speakers plugged into the Pi’s headphone jack. My monitor doesn’t have any speakers in it.
Any further word on this? I have just bought a pi 4 and a Piano Hat, and I too am having issues with some of the keys not working. LEDs light up on all of the keys, but only the A, B and C keys play a sound, when testing using the simple piano script. It would appear that the ‘Instrument’ and octave up/down keys are also functional. The 8bit synth script has the same behaviour.
Does anybody have any suggestions? I’d just go and buy another Pi Zero W to use with it, but sadly they are currently unavailable.
If your using anything other than a Pi 4B you could try going back to a previous version of Raspbian.
You can get the older versions here, http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/
My Piano Hat was fully functional when I first got it (pre Buster).
Nope, I am also on a Pi 4B. I have another Pi on order, but it is also a 4B. Do I need to source an older pi to make use of the Piano Hat, or is this something that Pimoroni would be looking in to?
That I don’t know? I don’t work for or have any kind of official connection with Pimoroni.
You could e-mail Pimoroni with your concerns.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/pages/contact-us
If you go that route I would put a link to this thread in the e-mail.
following this thread i try my drumhat on the pi4 ,i get sound in all keys in every example i tried ,only issue is they are not piano sounds ,will do some more testing and post back later …, i looked back in this thread and i poster that i had it work ,have to admit my memory isn’t what it use to be ,and i dont remember doing that test ,
ok,just installed the piano on a fresh Blaster same pi4,and it worked great ,all keys worked with simple-piano.py ,pi 4 has only a small heatsinc ,no fanshim installed …
Thanks Jack. I think I’ll go find my piano hat and give it another try. I actually think I know what box its in this time, lol.
Kind of works on my Pi 4B. All the letter keys work and the corresponding LED’s light up. The instrument and octave buttons work but those LED’s seem messed up? Octave down lights un the instrument LED and the instrument button lights up the octave down LED. The butons do what they say as near as I can tell though, just the wrong LED lights up.
Also, when I switched to drums only the first couple of letter keys worked. piano.py is the one I ran from idle3.
I don’t know if this factors into it but my Piano hat is light green in color. It’s one of the very early ones.
Yeah mine only plays first 3 on drums too, I think Thats all that work on my pizero setup to ,I would have to check to be positive of that though …
My monitor doesn’t have any speakers so no way for me to test with a Pi Zero. Not easily anyway. It’s a bit of a PITA to use my TV.
Yeah, I have speaker pHat on my pi zero setup. Now I just need to learn to play it lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_T3Hg-4PQY&t=14s
I’ve been wanting get a drum hat for a while, and a speaker phat to use with it. Always seems to something I want that little bit more though.
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Ah, my pi 4 is in an Argon One case, which has a fan wired in, and some additional wiring to redirect the GPIOs to a different endpoint. I wonder if this is part of my issue? My new Pi 4 should arrive tomorrow. I will try it on that one…
If the fan has some control circuitry that uses one of more of the GPIO pins to turn it on off etc, it could interfere with Hats attached. It would depend on what pins are used.
I took my Blinkt and Fan Shim off of my Pi 4 to test the Piano hat. And made sure non of the associated software / services were running in the background.
Yes, that turned out to be the issue for me. It looks like the additional circuitry in the Argon One case is causing the issue with the piano hat. My new pi 4 is in the Argon Neo case, which has no fans or anything else connected to the GPIOs. The piano hat works fine on the new pi.
So, I guess the fan on the Argon One (or possibly some other internal circuitry - apparently there is also an IR receiver in there somewhere) is using a pin that conflicts with the piano hat.
Anyway - all good for me. Works great on the pi 4 in the Argon Neo case.
For the most part I’m using the Pibow cases. The Coupe version works well with most Hats.
The new Pi 4B complicates things a bit with how hot it can get. Put a Hat on top and it can make it worse. It won’t overheat, but will throttle back the CPU if it gets to 80 c. That will hurt performance.