Hi
I purchased the Pirate Radio Kit over xmas and I have installed it according to these instructions:
https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/sandyj/internet-radio-on-your-pirate-radio
I am using the latest version of Raspbian Lite and have done sudo --update and sudo --upgrade
I have tested the PhatBeat and it works based on the examples provided and I can hear audio being played through the test WAV file however nothing plays when VLC Radio is installed. Pi was rebooted. There was this error during the install ‘apt failed to install vlc-nox’. I did manually install VLC and trying to install vlc-nox it came back and said to try vlc-bin which I did.
When I try to check the list of radio stations config file there isn’t a file located at:
/home/pi/.config/vlc/playlist.m3u
So assume VLC Radio did not successfully install??
Best Guess is its a VLC versus Buster issue? It might even be because your using the Lite version. There appear to be some things missing in the Lite version of Buster that were in previous Lite versions of Raspbian. Thats the impression I get.
I’m still running Jessie or Stretch on my Pirate radio. It’s working fine so why fix what’s not broken etc.
One option is to install Buster with Desktop. Do all your setup etc and then go into Raspberry Pi configuration and set it to boot to command line. It’s what I did. I like doing things from the GUI versus command line. I can also just clip and past the commands from a browser into the terminal, no typo’s etc.
If that still doesn’t work you could try Stretch instead of Buster. You can get it here.
http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/
Ah, thats good to hear. The only current Pi model that has to run Buster is the Pi 4B. Any other version just will not boot on it. I probably should have mentioned that, I guess I just assumed you were running a Pi Zero W. Anyway enjoy your tunes. My Pirate Radio gets used a lot on weekends. I like my classic rock.
cheers!!
Also according to installation article to edit the station playlist the file should be located in:
/home/pi/.config/vlc/playlist.m3u
I could not find it and doing a search in Terminal the only .m3u’s which are coming back are located in two folders. To work out which m3u playlist was correct I did a test checking the actual station playing on my Mac and it appears the correct location to edit the list of stations is actually at:
/etc/vlcd/default.m3u
sudo nano /etc/vlcd/default.m3u Is what I have in my crib sheet for pirate radio.
You can also just copy your playlist.m3u file to the fat32 boot partition on the SD Card on a PC.
When the Pi boots up it gets moved to the correct location and becomes the new default playlist.
This will erase all the presets though. It’s what I do as I only ever listen to a couple of stations.
I’m going through install issues as well - did you ever get Apt failed to install mopidy errors?
I’m running the same 2019-04-08 version of raspbian stretch lite…
After installing the latest raspbian, install worked fine, but I think the previous bad install did something to the phatbeat board because now there are no leds when powering up as it did before install. Wondering if it was fried somehow…
From what I remember there are sample python scripts which you can run to test various aspects of the board. Sorry I built this up 2 years ago so struggling to remember. I know I had issues in getting this board to work initially but managed to solve it in the end with everything working and I’m sure I had the same issue as you with the leds. I think I had to use a previous version of Raspbian from what I remember to get everything working. I think I still have the SD card for it so if you are stuck I can try and have a look for you to see if I can build an image file you can have.
The Python function reference for the phat beat is here,
Welcome — pHATBEAT 0.0.1 documentation (pimoroni.com)
There is code to lite up the LED’s
I did a reinstall not all that long ago but can’t remember if I had any issues. It’s not running the latest PiOS, it’s an older Buster release from I believe before it became PiOS.
The very latest PiOS now installs and uses Pulse Audio for sound which may be your issue.
There was a VLC Radio install issue now that I think about it. That should have been patched by now though. The glitch was it didn’t check for Buster and errored out looking for an earlier version of Raspbian. I have the fix I used if you need it.