Picochess Lite Audio

[Marc Hamilton]

I'm trying to enable an external speaker on a the most recent version of the 64 bit Picochess Lite.  I'm setting the audo to '0' (headphones) in raspi-config. 

I have 3 other legacy lite images with no issues reproducing the sound, so it's not the hardware. I'm a bit baffled... any ideas?

[Marc Hamilton]

Never mind... I got it by entering this in asound.config and turning the sound up in alsamixer.

defaults.pcm.card 0
defaults.ctl.card 0

[RandyR]

Hi Mark,

In a DGTPi the audio will default to Headphones. I suspect the issue is the volume. The same voice-volume setting on the Lite image (which doesn't use PulseAudio) will be much lower than the Desktop image. I will fix this in the next release. If you want to apply the fix yourself, edit /opt/picochess/dgt/menu.py, around line 1712, and change the volume_cmd to the following:

            volume_cmd = f"amixer -M sset {channel} {factor}%"

Randy

[Marc Hamilton]

Yes, it was the volume... set the volume to 17 in picochess.ini and stored the alsamixer settings so I could reestablish the 100 volume setting at boot. Good now. 

Initially, I didn't know it was the volume, because if I restored the alsamixer settings a second time the volume was good, so I was chasing the configuration. Then at some point I held the speaker to my ear and faintly heard the audio. 

I like to have the option to play with the DGT Pi but prefer the e-Board setting in the Desktop version. That was a great enhancement... It's nice to have the Power menu option to return to the desktop. That was my main reason for upgrading to the latest release. 

[Marc Hamilton]

Thanks for the fix.  I have noticed that I lose my SSH (Samba) network connection after booting and have to re-issue sudo service smbd start This is something new in all recent releases. 

[Randy Reade]

Samba was disabled since not everyone uses PicoChess connected to a network and it causes a long delay at startup in that case. I think the commands you want are the following:

systemctl enable smbd.service

systemctl enable nmbd.service

but I'm not at my PC. I think it's mentioned in the enclosed documents in the archive.

Randy

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[Marc Hamilton]

Thanks - I have the commands to enable/disable the services as aliases..., so it's an easy fix. 

[Peter Eggen]

Hi,

this obviously won't work on a Pi5 as this has now Audio Jack. Any thoughts to get this running with an alternative?

[RandyR]

On any pi you can see what cards are seen by alsa (on the Lite image with no PulseAudio installed) with the command:

aplay -l

On a pi5 with a speaker plugged into a USB audio adapter it will probably work without the asound.conf file. If not, just change the numbers to match the card you want to use. Bluetooth speakers require more work.

Randy