Pirate Radio Kit pHAT Beat DAC buttons sporadically working

Support
1

Hi, I bought a Pirate Radio kit with the Pi Zero W and pHAT Beat DAC recently. Everything works fine except the buttons on the pHAT. They only seem to work very sporadically, if I keep turning the radio off and on then they maybe work one time in twenty. Would anyone have any idea what I could do to make the buttons work every time please? Thanks a million!

2

Could you post a picture of your soldering, and also list the steps you went through to set up the software?

Cheers

3

Hi,

Thanks a million for the support, much appreciated.

I gave the radio to my Mum for her birthday at the weekend and won’t see her until the weekend, so won’t be able to put pics up until the weekend.

However there was no soldering, I used the hammer header kit, so I’d be hopeful that the connections aren’t the issue.

Regarding the install, I ran the following command from the terminal:

curl https://get.pimoroni.com/vlcradio | bash

All I did after this was create a playlist.m3u in the location spec’d by the tutorial - this works fine.

I did this install advised by the link from the kit website.

The radio changes station fine using the web app, browsing to the IP of it. Unfortunately this is something my Mum isn’t going to be able to use.

Apologies that I can’t put pics now but I will at the weekend, but if you have any ideas in the mean time that might fix the buttons it’d be great, as I could then fix it for my Mum at the weekend.

Thanks and Best Regards,

Seán

4

it could be a mechanical issue with the buttons. I recommend you try the test.py script from our repository to check whether buttons pressed are recognised reliably:

… you may have to stop the services running in the background first though:

sudo service phatbeatd stop
sudo service vlcd stop

(the second shouldn’t be necessary but best to stop it as well)

to re-enable them easiest is to reboot the Pi, or switch stop for start in the above commands.

5

Sorry for my delayed reply - thanks a million for the tip, I’ll give that a try next weekend and let you know how I get on. Thanks a million for the help, much appreciated!

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