I encountered a problem with my speakerphat where, it used to work perfectly (sound and all), but during some development with the Google AIY project, the speaker got really hot.
Since then, the sound is almost muted (i checked all the settings with alsa and everything is fine), very crak-ery.
I recheck the soldering points (header and 2 wires leading to the speaker) but despite having everything OK, the speaker is almost in-audible.
Could it have died ? How could I check it and is there any speaker only replacement parts available ?
I desoldered the speaker and used the one provided with the AIY project, and the sound is loud and clear, so this is not a problem with the card.
Is there a chance that when you were developing some metal got in between the two speaker joints on the back shorting it. Because this would explain the heat I think
Nope unfortunatelly, the pHat was properly installed on a piZero and there
was no loose metal/connections.
May be it comes from the way the Google Assistant works, having the speaker
always on, or, because of the very limited space there is between a piZero
and the phat.
Still, it does not explain why the sound was fine before, and then got very
deteriorated.
That sounds like an issue that I think is caused by pulseaudio, where the speaker is constantly driven even when there is no audio. It’s worth checking if the AIY installation uses pulseaudio. We’ve definitely encountered this issue before. Pop an email to support@pimoroni.com and we can get a replacement speaker out to you. :-)