Pirate Audio blank screen (also iris not installed?)

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1

First off, yes, SPI is enabled. I’m trying to use a pi zero2w for this.
Recently I acquired a pirate audio headphone amp board from Mouser. Easier to ship here, and they were out of stock on the official site (also I don’t think there’s shipping to South America at all)

I’ve seen some topics as far as 2020 and none of them seems to have a proper answer for this. Besides the “turn on spi on raspi-config”, whatever was supposed to happen just isn’t happening. I CAN get to the web interface, and I can access the pi via ssh. I also tried adding the dtoverlay line under “all” at the end of the config.txt file. Nothing seems to work.

That said, the board seems to be detected by the pi. I’m getting both card 0: sndrpihifiberry and card 1: vc4hdmi from aplay -l

edit: I’m reading the install instructions and there’s mention of an “iris” web interface? I’m not seeing that anywhere. Also, after I adjusted the directory for local music in the mopidy.conf in /etc, the scan didn’t even seem to pick up the folder, it only searched under /var/lib/mopidy/media.

There’s either something I’m missing, or I’m using the wrong install. Should I be using bullseye or bookworm for this??

edit2: I’m guessing there’s something broken with the install. mopidy-iris isn’t something I can install normally via apt, I had to force it via the following command:

sudo python3 -m pip install Mopidy-Iris --break-system-packages

Then and only then it would be available to me on the mopidy web interface, but it also doesn’t find anything I’ve put in the media folder.

edit3: After all that, I tried moving a single file to /var/lib/mopidy/media. Then and only then mopidy scanned it and it appeared in the forcefully installed iris. Worse yet, I still have a blank display. It lights up, but that’s it. Obviously this is less than optimal, but at least the audio out is working. I get no response on the buttons either.
I’d start from scratch with this install if someone pointed me what I’m missing.

2

I think you should think about why you bought this device. It mainly is a collection of a few peripherals in a very neat package:

  • an I2S headphone amplifier-chip
  • a few buttons
  • a small square ST7789 display

It is not a ready to use gadget that only needs some software. In fact, the software that Pimoroni supplies should be seen as an example of what you can do with great hardware like this.

This software was written many years ago, and the software itself and the install-program is not really supported and maintained. I think this is ok for a hardware shop like Pimoroni is. So you are on your own to figure out what to do (and you already made some nice progress).

I would really suggest a different approach: look for example programs for the individual components:

  • a simple program that plays music (I would recommend mpg123)
  • a simple program that processes buttons
  • a simple program that uses an ST7789 display to show something

If you have all that, you know what is needed and how to do install and program it. And then you can maybe understand what is going wrong with the installer or sample application.

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Actually, the not mantained part is the issue here. I can understand that it wouldn’t be a drop in thing and it would magically work - configuration and some research is necessary.

But I had no idea it was broken to this extent.

So, to answer myself and anyone finding this in the future, there might be two options for you to START everything and THEN be able to fiddle with hardware, software and new code:

1: you install Raspberry OS Bullseye and follow the normal procedure (not sure this will work either)

2: you do what I did, which is install Raspberry OS Bookworm, and instead of the usual procedure, you get the force-push from Gadgetoid at the end of this page discussing the install script (click on force-pushed, then click split on the upper right, then you can download the modified .sh file) and have the board working as intended.

After this, you can actually make more things with the board if you want to.

Thanks to ahnlak on the pimoroni discord server for pointing out this experimental branch.