Pirate Radio Led's don't work?

Support
1

Hello! Just put my Pirate Radio together without a hitch…plays fine…but I have no LEDs on the Phatbeat for some reason…something I missed?

Thanks,

Nick

(will pick up a second speaker me thinks…mono is so early 20th century…)

2

Could be! Did you follow any of our guides/run any of our install scripts?

The LEDs are driven by a project called “Pi VU Meter”, which is configured in /etc/asound.conf

Can you grab the contents of that file with: cat /etc/asound.conf and post them here?

3

Hi! Yes, I followed the guide and used the curl script to install everything…I will grab the file contents and post when I get home from work…thanks for the quick reply!

4

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm “softvol_and_pivumeter”
}

ctl.!default {
type hw
card 0
}

pcm.pivumeter {
type meter
slave.pcm “hw:0,0”
scopes.0 pivumeter
}

pcm.softvol_and_pivumeter {
type softvol
slave.pcm “pivumeter”
control {
name “PCM”
card 0
}
}

pcm_scope.pivumeter {
type pivumeter
decay_ms 500
peak_ms 400
brightness 128
output_device phat-beat
}

pcm_scope_type.pivumeter {
lib /usr/local/lib/libpivumeter.so
}

pcm.dsp0 pivumeter

5

That looks fine; what do you see if you run:

sudo systemctl stop pulseaudio
speaker-test -c2 -twav
6

The VU meter works on the test, illuminating each side up to the middle repetitively…no idea how to kill the process via SSH though…;-)

7

Should just kill with Ctrl+C, what application are you normally using for playing music?

8

I just installed the software according to the instructions, so not sure what application is running the audio on the Pirate Radio…are there choices? I will try Crtl+C…I use Terminal on my mac to SSH into the Pi…

9

Right, a long overdue update on this issue. I ended up using a fresh install of Noobs and voila, the VU meter works! Now have a stereo pirate radio and i’m loving it. However, when I try to add new urls via the terminal there’s no /home/pi/.config/vlc/playlist.m3u file that exists… ??

10

You can simply create that file- the default playlist exists elsewhere, and you can see its contents here: https://github.com/pimoroni/phat-beat/blob/master/projects/vlc-radio/vlcd/etc/vlcd/default.m3u