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  • Author Author: saurocksall
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Rocking The Rocking Raspberry Pi Challenge.. Part 8 Problems I am Facing With Wolfson Audio Card...

saurocksall

Hi Guys, Sorry for the delay My exams are going on currently, so I was busy in them and had no time to write the blog, however I took time to work on the project,

In this post I will discuss about some problems I am facing with the Wolfson Audio Card.. If any one out there can help me please help me out..

 

So Here it goes..

 

First I tried to download the Image file provided by  Wolfson, it took around 15 hours to download, and after I unzipped the file size was bigger than the size of my memory card, I was depressed and angry because of this, So I searched and searched the internet for a solution for this and found ragnar.jensen's Image file which was smaller and I downloaded and installed on my card..

 

After which I am facing these problems :


1). Raspberry pi hangs allot, and gets over heated..


2).Wi-Pi and other USB devices don't work properly, works for some time and then stops completely and then system freezes..


3). When I remove and replace any USB device, Raspberry pi gets restarted, this is strange !!!


4). VLC Media player hangs allot, and shows error in audio output..


5). And the most interesting one is now I can't even get audio output form the Pi's audio jack !!!


The competition is near its end and I am now really far behind because of Wolfson Audio card, I am not a software person, but know the basic stuff, But unlike the PiFace CAD Wolfson Audio card has almost no support and tutorials etc. for making it easy to use, I agree that it is a fine piece of hardware but if it not easy to use its not worth any thing, the Element14 team should really need to focus on to provide some good documentation on how to use it, with some good examples like the PiFace People made, Something like that will be really helpful, and please make a smaller image file for it, or better make it install-able by apt-get or something..


If some one has the solutions to my problems please help me out, I will be really thank full to you guys...

  • in reply to saurocksall

    Hi Saurabh,

     

    One last thing, I noticed on the 'net people mention omxplayer as being hardware accelerated, whereas (say) mplayer is not. With mplayer, a 720p video will be very sluggish.

    There is this post which describes how VLC can be hardware accel enabled: http://intensecode.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/tutorial-vlc-with-hardware-acceleration.html

     

    I just don't know for sure if they version you're using is hardware enabled or not (and no idea if it comes with the raspbian image or not). It may be worth checking around, or as an alternative use omxplayer for now, since that is definitely hardware-accelerated.

  • in reply to saurocksall

    Hi Saurabh,

     

    I just took a look at Ragnar's build mentioned in the comments here and it looks good as far as I can tell. And it looks like he has built it on the latest Raspbian too, so this should work.

    My build finally completed it, and my RPI boots up fine. This is without the wolfson card, I don't have it. I have placed my built files here.

    If you wish to use these built files, note they will only work on the Raspbian that is currently downloadable, I used

     

    NOOBS

     

    Version: 1.3.4

     

    Release date: 2014-01-07

    Approx 1.3Gbyte download (.zip file)

     

    First, make a backup to your PC of anything important that is on your SD card!! If these instructions fail, at worst case you'll need to re-create your SD card from the NOOBS file that you will download - so not a major issue, as long as any important files are backed up.

     

    Grab the file mentioned from github. After gunzip, and un-tarring (type gunzip rpi.tar.gz  followed by tar xvf rpi.tar) it will contain:

     

    pi@raspberrypi:/mnt/share/rpi$ ls -altr
total 64
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi   pi    633 Apr 27 14:03 SPDIF_record.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi   pi    537 Apr 27 14:03 SPDIF_playback.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi   pi   1319 Apr 27 14:03 Reset_paths.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi   pi    730 Apr 27 14:03 Record_from_lineIn.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi   pi    555 Apr 27 14:03 Record_from_Headset.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi   pi    588 Apr 27 14:03 Record_from_DMIC.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi   pi    714 Apr 27 14:03 Playback_to_Speakers.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi   pi    393 Apr 27 14:03 Playback_to_Lineout.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi   pi    793 Apr 27 14:03 Playback_to_Headset.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi   pi    510 Apr 27 14:03 debug_info.sh
-rw-r--r-- 1 pi   pi    272 Apr 27 14:03 .asoundrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 pi   pi   2009 Apr 27 14:03 hd_tracks.png
drwxr-xr-x 2 pi   pi   4096 Apr 27 14:06 rpi_wlf_3.10_beta
drwxr-xr-x 3 pi   pi   4096 Apr 27 14:19 compiled
drwxr-xr-x 4 pi   pi   4096 Apr 27 14:20 .
drwxrwxrwx 6 root root 4096 Apr 27  2014 ..
pi@raspberrypi:/mnt/share/rpi$

    Everything above will be in the /home/pi/rpi folder, but move it to /home/pi, i.e. you should see /home/pi/SPDIF_record.sh for example.

     

    The folder called 'compiled' contains:

    pi@raspberrypi:/mnt/share/rpi/compiled$ ls -altr
total 6616
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root    4096 Apr 27 14:17 lib
drwxr-xr-x 3 pi   pi      4096 Apr 27 14:19 .
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6749088 Apr 27 14:19 kernel.img
drwxr-xr-x 4 pi   pi      4096 Apr 27 14:20 ..

    The lib folder contains everything that should be copied to /lib on your RPI

    the kernel.img needs to be copied to /boot (make a backup of the current kernel.img that is there).

    To do that, from the compiled folder, type: "sudo cp -R lib /"

    That will copy the lib folder contents. Then, type

    sudo mv /boot/kernel.img /boot/kernel.img.backup
sudo cp kernel.img /boot/kernel.img

     

    Hopefully that will work, but you may have to play around a bit in case I made a mistake in these instructions.

     

    If it messes up, you'll need to re-create your SD card again, which of course does not take a long time, but make sure you've got nothing on your SD card that is not backed up if you need it.

  • in reply to shabaz

    Hi Shabaz,

     

    Thanks for your efforts, I really appreciate them. I am not a software guy so it is really tough thing for me, have you checked out ragnar.jensen's image file ??

  • in reply to saurocksall

    Hi Saurabh,

     

    Just to let you know, the process to compile the kernel natively on the RPI will take an extremely long time. I started last night, and 12 hours later it is still building. This is without any overclocking or other parameter changes.