Almost got Google AIY DAC working

Project help balenaSound
#1

I’ve been playing around with trying to get balenaSound working with my Google AIY Voice HAT DAC, and I think I’ve almost got it, but I’m just missing some configuration somewhere. The DAC should require a dtOverlay=googlevoicehat-soundcard and that’s pretty much it. I confirmed the driver is already present for the Raspberry Pi 3 I’m using. I played around a bit with various settings, and eventually got speaker-test working, but only if I forced the device: speaker-test -c2 -twav -l7 -D plughw:0,0
(cat /proc/asound/modules only ever shows snd_soc_rpi_simple_soundcard, while aplay -l shows: card 0: sndrpigooglevoi [snd_rpi_googlevoicehat_soundcar], device 0: Google voiceHAT SoundCard HiFi voicehat-codec-0 [Google voiceHAT SoundCard HiFi voicehat-codec-0])

However, I was never able to get any sound to play via Airplay or Bluetooth. Most recently, I added the environment variable AUDIO_OUTPUT set to DAC as specified here: https://github.com/balenablocks/audio#environment-variables
This got me a little closer, as I could now see pulseaudio seeming to find the DAC, but still no audio would play. What’s worse, the device is now “busy” when trying speaker-test, even after removing the AUDIO_OUTPUT environment variable.

Anyone have any ideas on how to debug getting this DAC working? It’s the perfect DAC for a multi-room setup: my Microcenter sells them for $5 quite often, so I have a ton of them, and a Pi Zero should be able to use it as a client, letting me put speakers everywhere for around $10.

#5

Hi Brian, I’ve pinged some of our team to take a look a this, but I don’t think that’s a DAC we have any experience with. We’ll get back to you on this, but I don’t know much advice we’ll be able to offer. Alternatively, let’s see if anyone from the Community chimes in. :slight_smile:

#8

Thanks, I appreciate that. I thought I was onto something when I saw that the audio entry.sh script (https://github.com/balenablocks/audio/blob/master/entry.sh) only recognized cards with a DAC in their name, but no such luck. I’m currently researching whether the pinout of the VoiceHAT matches another DAC to try that dtOverlay, so we’ll see about that. Not really a big deal, this is mostly a fun project for me to learn more about balena, and it’s working!

#9

Hi Brian,
Do keep us posted here on any progress you make with that DAC. I too bought some from the same source and I imagine others have as well!