My itty bitty beat box won’t work with the Pirate Audio either. The Piano plays OK when run from Thonny, and the drums play OK when run from Thonny. Try to run them both with that custom bash file and the second one that loads breaks the first one. I swapped the two entries around and it switches, drums work piano doesn’t, then piano works and drums don’t. I gave away my only Speaker phat so I’m stuck now. Pimoroni discontinued them. Sorry for the off topic rant, It’s been that kind of day.
I’ve been messing with this Pirate Audio board all day and pretty well got no where meaningful.
I may have another go at trying to get Pirate Radio on the Pirate Audio, I’m likely going to wait and see how you guys make out first though, I wiped that SD card to start over from scratch.
I’m actually very interested to know exactly what any of you did to get streaming audio from a web link to play on it? Regardless of if the buttons work or if the display works.
I have yet to get any sound at all from it when I tried to set it up as a Pirate Radio.
a head banger, if you don’t get it working i have no issue with trading back , i have my Itty bitty beat box working ,and i wouldn’t want you to not have yours working … … it’ll give me something to drive me nuts, again ,lol i’ll use it with iris or just hang it up as a wall ornament ,lol
Maybe it was a software glitch or something, the Piano Hat was really messed up at the end so maybe it was the culprit. The Drum Hat and the Piano hat were working OK right up until I created and ran that custom bash script. I could trade you something else if your interested. I have a spare Unicorn HD Mini I’ll straight trade you for it, if it comes to really needing the Speaker pHat. I wouldn’t ask if you didn’t already have one.
Anyway, getting back on topic I’m going to have a look at that custom Pimoroni VLC-Radio install and see if I can remark out the stuff I don’t for sure want installed.
Also going to try streaming a web link without Mopidy installed, with just a stock VLC-Radio. Might be tomorrow but I am going to have another go.
Reimaged my SD card, and only did the config.txt edit for the sound.
dtoverlay=hifiberry-dac
gpio=25=op,dh
Once you do that and right click the speaker icon, hifiberry will show up under sources. If you select it as the default device, the speaker icon will turn into an X and you will lose volume control. You can adjust it up and down if you select HDMI or Analog, the X goes away with those selections.
If you change dtparam=audio=on to dtparam=audio=off the same thing happens, the speaker icon is Xed out and you lose volume up down.
I double clicked my playlist.m3u file and VLC opened running the first entry, classic rock 109. I got no sound though? All indications were it was playing it but I got no sound out of the speaker?
This is a PITA to put it mildly. =( I did not install mopidy. Not yet anyway. My only consolation is I have a perfectly functional Pirate Radio with the pHat Beat to fall back on and use.
On a semi related note, I finally got the Pirate Audio working on my itty bitty beat box. In anticipation of swapping it out for a speaker phat, I ran the speaker phat installer. On the reboot I had all my sounds playing. Down side is you end up with all the Pi VU Meter stuff installed that just runs in the background doing nothing useful. I am going to run the speaker phat installer on my Pirate Radio setup some time today, and then see if I get sound from my stream in VLC. I have a bunch of other family related stuff to do first though. I hate it when real life interferes with play time, lol.
EDIT: Still a no go for me after running the Speaker pHat installer. VLC is showing the song titles etc and the timer is advancing like its playing tunes but no sound at all. Clicking the >> and << switches streams to a different station and play pause seem to work, just no sound at all?
It sounds like you’re SO close to making your Pirate radio working, and I’m just waiting for some quality time when I can sit down and really get under the hood of this. I’ll follow along on some of the trials and tangents you’ve taken and see what I an come up with. It looks like both you and I have the same relative goals, so we’re going down the same path I believe.
I have a working Pirate Radio with a pHat Beat. Having just acquired a Pirate Audio I thought I’d have a go at getting that running a Pirate Radio. I wanted to see if it would show the song titles of what was playing etc. I’m not even close to getting the display working, and no sound, so I’m just going to see how you get on. Then decide if I want to have another try.
I have sound with it on my Beat Box, and some button function. I can shut down with the X Button. I want to try and map volume up down to A and B, and do something with the display. If I learn something there maybe it will be transferable here. For now Pirate Radio on a Pirate Audio is on the back burner for me.
I will be watching this thread, and can try some stuff if need be. All I have to do is swap Micro SD cards. Good luck.
I’ve been using the pHAT BEAT for a few years to stream Internet radio stations and was hoping to do something similar with the Pirate Audio (3W Stereo Amp) and a Pi Zero W. It’s a bit of a workaround but it at least allows for switching on the Pi and being able to skip through a few radio stations from a playlist without using a browser first:
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Follow the instructions (Getting Started with Pirate Audio) and check that some audio (e.g. a song copied to the Pi) can be played through the speaker
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In Iris (using the URL shown on the little display) create a playlist (e.g. titled Radio)
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In the Now Playing screen click the Add + button and paste in the stream URL, then click the add button at the end of that field and finally the green add button
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The stream URL should now appear on the Now Playing screen. Click on play and it should start on the Pi. If it works click on the menu at the end of the row with the stream URL and add it to the new Radio playlist
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Repeat step 3 and 4 for other URLs until you have all of the stations you want in the Radio playlist
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Install Mopidy-DefaultPlaylist (Mopidy-DefaultPlaylist · PyPI) and add the configuration section to
/etc/mopidy/mopidy.conf- changingdefaultplaylist_namefromTop HitstoRadioand deleting the line for shuffle -
Restart the server through Iris (or restart the Pi) and it should start playing the first stream from the Radio playlist. The skip button should go to the next stream.
There are a few issues… the name of the station isn’t displayed (just the title/artist or the metadata being sent by the station). For me sometimes the display goes to sleep and won’t come back on until the Pi is restarted. I’ve also found that the volume up button will sometimes no longer respond while the others are OK, but I’m not sure if this was also the case with normal MP3s.
I am still shutting the Raspberry Pi down over SSH (using JuiceSSH on an Android phone) as the Pirate Audio doesn’t have a button like the pHAT BEAT.
Adding
dtoverlay=gpio-shutdown,gpio_pin=16,active_low=1,gpio_pull=up
to your confix.txt file will let you do a proper shutdown by pressing the X button.