Pirate Radio Stops Working

Hi, I bought a Pirate Radio Kit and have completed assembly and S/D card generation and update per the available instructions. Radio works well and all controls and functions appear to operate correctly. My problem is that after several hours it stops working, i.e. no audio, no VU, no response to control inputs except that the “shutdown” switch operates to allow the system to be shutdown and subsequently restarted by cycling power. The first error indication found in the /var/log/syslog file for each of the two recorded faults are as follows:

Jun 16 00:18:27 raspberrypi kernel: [20859.408087] sched: RT throttling activated
Jun 16 00:18:27 raspberrypi pulseaudio[258]: [alsa-sink-HifiBerry DAC HiFi pcm5102a-hifi-0] alsa-util.c: snd_pcm_avail() returned a value that is exceptionally large: 753123468 bytes (4269407 ms).
Jun 16 00:18:27 raspberrypi pulseaudio[258]: [alsa-sink-HifiBerry DAC HiFi pcm5102a-hifi-0] alsa-util.c: Most likely this is a bug in the ALSA driver ‘snd_soc_hifiberry_dac’. Please report this issue to the ALSA developers.

Jun 16 11:18:42 raspberrypi kernel: [ 4266.579386] sched: RT throttling activated
Jun 16 11:18:42 raspberrypi pulseaudio[265]: [alsa-sink-HifiBerry DAC HiFi pcm5102a-hifi-0] alsa-util.c: snd_pcm_avail() returned a value that is exceptionally large: 753527004 bytes (4271695 ms).
Jun 16 11:18:42 raspberrypi pulseaudio[265]: [alsa-sink-HifiBerry DAC HiFi pcm5102a-hifi-0] alsa-util.c: Most likely this is a bug in the ALSA driver ‘snd_soc_hifiberry_dac’. Please report this issue to the ALSA developers.

OS is Raspbian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) and Kernel Linux Raspberrypi 4.14.34+.

Has this issue been previously reported? Any thoughts on how to debug/troubleshoot this issue?

Thank you for any help that you can provide regarding this issue.

Discovered this solution during an on-line search:

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1479352

Re: snd_pcm_avail() returned a value that is exceptionally large

Try having a look at this thread, specifically post number 39. They may help fix your problem.

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1471262&page=4&p=9288726#post9288726

Re: Audio skips or stutters in Lucid

okay the fix I posted before I modified a little, because after installing wine the sound problems came back

Here’s what I did and it hardly ever skips

-install all the latest updates

-sudo gedit /etc/pulse/default.pa

and added tsched=0 to

load-module module-detect

  • sudo gedit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

changed realtime-priority = 5 to realtime-priority = 8

This solution has worked to turn the intermittent loss of audio on my Pimoroni Pirate Radio into a solid performer. Currently, system has run about 70 straight hours without a failure while streaming a specific mp3 audio stream. Before the fix was applied the audio would stop anywhere from a minimum of 4 hours to a maximum of 23 hours between failures. At each failure the similar out of range error was identified. A software shutdown followed by hardware power cycle restored the radio to normal operations. The fix appears to shift the audio system from a time sampled based system to an interrupt driven system and the fix continues to work successfully through the limited testing done at this time.

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Thanks for reporting back on this- I’ve got this thread on my TODO list to see if I can work these tweaks back into the Pirate Radio setup.