piCorePlayer Documentation

[mr-b]

Tx Greg. I think most folks appreciate that many docs are community 'as is' efforts and that no one is actively constantly verifying compatibilty matrics.
I've been shocked at the variance of DAC functionality and something, anything could have saved a great deal of time, frustration and money purchasing things that are just incompatible.
I'll write something up!

[Greg Erskine]

Hi mr-b,

We used to have such a DAC spreadsheet, but it has been dropped over the years. The problem was, in a few years the data gets out of date and we don't have the resources to go back and maintain the accuracy of the information.

For example, DAC xyz was reported to not work but after a year, unbeknown to us, the kernel gets updated and it now works.

How about writing a project about getting your DAC working?

regards
Greg

[mr-b]

Hi

Would it be possible to have a spreadheet of (USB) DAC (in)compatibilty with any "quirky" settings that PCP may need?
I've spent days tearing my hair out with a USB DAC which refused to work as a Bluetooth player until i used the "plughw" vs "hw" as the BT audio output, and apparently this is not a global requirement. :-(

The SB Touch has a google sheet that unfort. gets scribbled over as it's world-editable, so some form of editorial control on a PCP one would be good.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gid=1184266724 (The 24th June '22 edit has some actual info.)

[Greg Erskine]

Thanks for posting your solution.

[traderyoda]

I posted my solution at

http://forums.slimdevices.com/forum/user-forums/3rd-party-software/1637378-gpio-conflicts-adding-a-pushbutton-for-power-on-power-off

[traderyoda]

Understood. But in this state it will restart with a power interruption... from what I've been able to gather. And if GPIO is off the table, and you're running a UPS, then you need to cause the equivalent of taking power away momentarilly. So I'm focusing on GLOBAL_EN which when shorted to ground does just that, mimics pulling the plug. I think I have that right, but it's very hard to nail down exactly what state the Pi is in. As you say, everything is off but the 5V bus stays operational so you can pull it down for a beat or two, remove the short, and the 5v goes high and starts the Pi. I think the PiSugar S has a similar capability since it's upstream of the Pi - the power supply connects to the UPS then to the Pi - cut the UPS for a beat and the Pi sees the same thing, a power interruption.

[Greg Erskine]

It is fairly safe to assume when you select "Shutdown piCorePlayer" the Raspberry Pi will be shutdown. Nothing is running, no Jivelite, no OS, no software waiting for a screen input.

[traderyoda]

I'm running a Pi4B/PiSugar S UPS/HifiBerry Digi2 Pro/7" Pi touch screen on pCP 8.1/32 (couldn't get Jivelite to install on 8.2). Everything works fine except I can't turn the Pi back on.

I can't find an anwer in the Jivelite documentation as to what "Enable Power On Button when Powered Off" checked and selecting "Shutdown piCorePlayer" does. I assuming this mix puts the Pi in HALT mode and keeps GPIO3 powered and ready to receive a restart action if you touch the screen (even if the screen backlight is off).

In my configuration GPIO start isn't possible. The PiSugar S provides an option to leave GPIO3 alone so the sound card can access i2c but the off/on via GPIO won't work. Obviously pulling the plug doesn't trigger a restart with a UPS in the loop. My option is a momentary pushbutton on either the UPS or the Pi (shorting GLOBAL_EN). I just need to understand what power state the Pi is in when you select "Shutdown piCorePlayer" on a Pi4.

Can anyone clarify what happens.

[Paul Webster]

If it does not work with a recent Raspberry Pi OS (I tested with 2022-09-22-raspios-bullseye-armhf ) then it is almost certainly not going to work with pCP.

If using raspios then the only thing you have to do is
sudo cec-ctl --playback
because it defaults to using kms and the tooling is already installed.

[Greg Erskine]

Mainly pCP 8.1.0

The problem I have is I have never had CEC work, and there are so many variables.

Maybe my TV doesn't work properly, maybe the cable is sub standard??

And RPT have been playing around with HDMI since the release of the RPi4B, so each kernel version is probably different.

I started with a RPi0W but have changed to a RPi1B (with USB wifi) to reduce one variable.

[Paul Webster]

Were you trying on 8.1 ?

[Greg Erskine]

hi Paul,

Thanks for doing this.

I am trying but having no luck, so nothing to report.

regards
Greg

[Paul Webster]

8.1 works

Minimum steps to reproduce

Fresh SD card and put pCP 8.1 on it
Edit config.txt
gpu_mem=80 # For RPi1 not sure if needed for others

dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d

No need to comment out dtparam=audio=on ... which brings bonus that "headphone" device will still exist and, I presume, be available for Squeezelite (along with HDMI via iec958:CARD=vc4hdmi,DEV=0 )

Extensions - add v4l2-utils.tcz (to get the CEC controls)
(no need to resize SD card in this minimum setup - but you will have to if you later install Jivelite).

pcp br

sudo cec-ctl --playback (ultimately ... put it in Tweaks as a startup option but without "sudo " at the front)

sudo cec-ctl --monitor

use TV remote arrow keys and you should see
Received from TV to Playback Device 1 (0 to 4): POLL
Received from TV to Playback Device 1 (0 to 4): USER_CONTROL_PRESSED (0x44):
ui-cmd: right (0x04)
Received from TV to Playback Device 1 (0 to 4): USER_CONTROL_RELEASED (0x45)
Received from TV to Playback Device 1 (0 to 4): USER_CONTROL_PRESSED (0x44):
ui-cmd: down (0x02)
Received from TV to Playback Device 1 (0 to 4): USER_CONTROL_RELEASED (0x45)
Received from TV to Playback Device 1 (0 to 4): USER_CONTROL_PRESSED (0x44):
ui-cmd: up (0x01)
Received from TV to Playback Device 1 (0 to 4): USER_CONTROL_RELEASED (0x45)
Received from TV to Playback Device 1 (0 to 4): USER_CONTROL_PRESSED (0x44):
ui-cmd: left (0x03)
Received from TV to Playback Device 1 (0 to 4): USER_CONTROL_RELEASED (0x45)
Received from TV to Playback Device 1 (0 to 4): POLL

You should also see that "up" does command line history recall if you have the RPi console visible on TV.
If you had installed Jivelite and had it visible then you should be able to move through the menus (do not use Grid screen because no way to do equivalent of click / brightness).

[Paul Webster]

... I went back to pCP 8.1 and it didn't work ... then back to 8.0 and it didn't work ...
so just before I tried 8.0b3 (where I am pretty sure I had it working) I tried one more thing ...

I now have 8.0 with TV remote working.

Trick was to give explicit amount of gpu_mem in config.txt
I had been commenting it out which I thought would default to 64 on RPi1 but seems like that is not enough.
So I put
gpu_mem=80
in config.txt along with the dtoverlay for kms plus adding the v4l2-utils extension and the cec-ctl --playback in the Tweaks for startup.

The cursor keys work - which is enough to do basic things in non-grid skin.

Would be great if someone in pCP team can repeat this success.

I tried to repeat with 8.2 and it did not work ... HDMI via KMS working fine ... but CEC commands not seen on the way in.

sudo cec-ctl --monitor
does not show the IR commands coming in.


Will try again with 8.1 to try to work out when the retrograde step happened.

[Paul Webster]

For a reason that ai have not yet worked out, I am not able to get kms working with pCP 8.2 on my spare RPi 1.

However, try this on a pCP system that has kms + HDMI working:
Install extension v4l-utils
Then put this in startup tweaks

cec-ctl —playback
(MinusMinus)
and reboot

You should get a multi-line console message when booting showing that it found the CEC device

That might be enough for it to work (it is on latest Raspberry Pi OS).

If it does not work … try from command line:
sudo cec-ctl —monitor
and press a few keys on TV remote to see if anything gets printed on terminal