I’m hoping for some help here. I purchased the speaker pHAT to add to a Pi Zero W last Saturday, I soldered the speaker and connected it up on Wednesday. I installed MusicBox on to the Pi Zero and tested it all out. The sound leave was quiet but acceptable, once I’d found the right settings on MusicBox. I ran it again today and pushed the volume from 85% to 100% which indeed produced a louder sound. I paused the music whilst doing something and forgot I’d left the system on for quite a while. When I realised the whole system was rather hot. Having left it to cool I then checked the playback, but it was now too quiet to hear much and certainly about half as loud as it was. I have taken a good look at the soldering of the wire from the speaker to the board and the connections still look good. For the headers I used the pimoroni hammer headers (that was nice and easy) so no solder issues there.
Any other thoughts on what has happened, or did I overheat the whole system and something has broken?
There was an issue with the pHat Beat, where it would put a DC voltage on the speakers, when paused. And if paused for a long time the speakers would get hot. As far as I know that’s been fixed in the current installer. I would think they rolled that fix into the Speaker pHat software too? I would hope anyway. They both use the same DAC, the pHat Beat just uses two to get stereo.
To be honest I don’t have the knowledge to know exactly what happens. I just remember seeing similar posts dealing with VLC Radio (Pirate Radio) on the pHat Beat. And once they became awar it was happing, they rolled a fix in to the installer. I’m not sure if its rolled in the pHat Beat part or the Pirate Radio part of the installer. @gadgetoid likely knows the ins and outs, I think he’s the one that patched it.