Pirate Audio blank screen (also iris not installed?)

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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.

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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.

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Before condescending maybe you should take a look at how Pimoroni tempts us to part with our money : “Plug Pirate Audio Line-out for Raspberry Pi into your hi-fi amp or powered speakers, then sit back, relax, and soak in the rich, digital audio.” and “our custom Pirate Audio software and installer to make setting it all up a breeze”. They make it sound like what you’d call “ready to use gadget that only needs some software”. I got the audio to work but can get nothing out of the screen. As Yanazake said I don’t mind doing some of the work but I know my limits. Pimoroni should issue a warning not to buy unless you’re an experienced programmer (or have nothing better to do for the rest of your life). I feel like I’ve been knocked. And I don’t like that. I won’t be buying anything from or by Pimoroni ever again.

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I don’t know if there is an alternative. You could buy Chinese hardware without anything to start with. Or you can buy from Adafruit, they have simple learning guides for all of their products but as soon as you leave the hello-world level you have to dig into source-code and datasheets and program yourself. And their examples for the Pi are often also not valid anymore. Like so many other stuff you find in the Internet.

So all in all Pimoroni is the maker that provides the most as far as I can tell. But you are right, the shop-pages are (now) misleading, they are probably as unmaintained as the software/installers.

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I was very happy to be able to buy something from England. Especially from the town that gave us the Human League and Pulp. I haven’t even managed to get the “Hello World” on the screen. The screen is on but it’s blank. I can’t be sure that it’s not the hardware that is defective. One needs to know what the problem is before being able to solve it. Maybe some people like “to dig into source-code and datasheets” but it’s not really my thing. That’s not why I gave Pimoroni my money and they didn’t tell me to expect to do that. Is “Pi-moron-i” some kind of weird hidden message? Am I the Pi moron?

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Have you tried using the experimental installer linked above?

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Same problem here. Started again with Bullseye after trying and failing with many different solutions to install the outdated software on Bookworm and it did install, but I never got the URL appearing on the screen that the instructions said I should have on reboot and in fact nothing appears on the screen at all, even when playing an MP3 with embedded artwork. The buttons do work, but I have to guess what they do as the screen is blank. But at least there’s audio.

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Further experimentation and I’ve solved it for me. When I was running Python scripts, I kept getting the error, “you should not try to import numpy from its source directory; please exit the numpy source tree, and relaunch your python interpreter from there.”

I got rid of this with sudo apt install libopenblas-dev. I was then able to run some example scripts that target the screen, and after a reboot, I got the URL of Mopidy that the instructions said I should have got in the first place, and when I played a track, the title and artist came on the screen. Phew!

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I think that with these products Pimoroni is trying to deliver two rather different things and somewhat failing to deliver either, at least as far as the newcomer is concerned.

For those wanting a quick and easy music player, the tutorial is going to be confusing and overwhelming, even without the gradual degradation of the software environment. It doesn’t help that there is still a “sysadmin overhead” involved with modern Linux.

For those wanting to understand the fundamentals, relying on a mixture of Linux drivers and a stack of Python libraries is going to burden them with a lot of work deciphering what all the code is doing. Web-based playlist managers and easily-broken integration with streaming services are additional distractions. That said, having code available is really helpful in understanding the hardware.

I’m not really complaining about the product myself, as I use a different family of single-board computer and system-on-chip, and even a different software environment, so I know that I am responsible for getting it working for me. I just feel for those buying something nice and finding that the learning curve is a lot steeper than they had hoped.

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Well I found it. I think. But I have no idea what to do with it or how to use it. I’m more of a “our custom Pirate Audio software and installer to make setting it all up a breeze” kind of person. That’s what I paid for.

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I think it’s a fair point that Pimoroni should probably flag up what version(s) of OS are supported by the ‘main’ install scripts on their products - the Pirate Audio tutorial mentions using “the latest version of Raspbian Buster” which is (at the very least) a warning flag that things might not be smooth sailing on Bookworm.

To answer your “I don’t know what to do with it”; following @yanazake’s walkthrough, you basically grab the experimental install file from pirate-audio/mopidy/install.sh at feature/pi5-mopidy · pimoroni/pirate-audio · GitHub and run it (./install.sh)

Reports on Bookworm are positive, but I’ve not tried it myself. Although come to think of it, I might even have some sort of Pirate Audio in my box of shame, so if I can find an unused Pi somewhere on my desk I’ll give it a spin.

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Thanks. I really appreciate your help. I might try it later. And I might even let you know how it goes. Have a good day.