Several years ago I purchased a Blokas Pisound sound card for the Raspberry Pi, which I have never used until now. I see that Zynthian has support for Pisound in the webconf, although with the RPi5 I had to select a different devicetree overlay specifically for the RPi5 to get it to work at all.
Audio works now, but with DIN MIDI In, I get dropped and hanging notes. So something is fishy here. I’ve put a question in the Blokas Community forum if the firmware on the Pisound might need upgrading - as far as I understand MIDI goes via an MCU and SPI (for reasons I cannot fathom, surely it would have been easier to use the on-board RPi UART, although using SPI frees the UART for other tasks I suppose).
Anyway, just wondered if anyone else has had success (or not) with the Pisound (v1.0 in this case) and an RPi5 based Zynthian.
Hi ricard
I am by no means an expert, but it could well be the Pi 5 and DIN MIDI. If you have a Pi 4 to test with, this worked for me. All of my Pi 5s do not play nice over DIN MIDI. Mind you they work with USB Midi without any hanging notes.
The thing is, that the Pisound doesn’t use the RPi UART like for instance the Zynthian kits do. Instead there is a small MCU that communicates with the RPi using SPI.
I put a similar question to the Pisound forum and got the answer that the firmware in the MCU needs upgrading. It’s a bit cumbersome as I need to move the card to an older RPi to do it (the upgrade scripts are outdated), but I’m going to try it when I have the time and see if it fixes the issue.
Ok, off the topic of the thread somewhat, but are you saying that you’ve had problems with DIN MIDI on a Zynthian with RPi5 ? That would seem to be a major stumbling block for V5.1 .
Sorry I did not mean to hijack your thread. Yes I had and still have DIN5 issues with the PI5. All fine with the PI4. This was my thread Stuck/Hanging Notes - #16 by hannesmenzel
What config would need to be tweaked exactly?
Finally got around to updating the Pisound (details in this thread if anyone needs a reference: Pisound v1.0 MIDI issues (Zynthian) - #9 by ricard - Support - Blokas Community) which was a bit cumbersome since the upgrade scripts have not themselves been upgraded as new Raspberry Pi versions came along. However, after upgrading the Pisound, DIN MIDI on the Pisound board works, and the whole system seems more stable too, like the Pisound was generating excessive interrupts at certain periods, causing the CPU to get overloaded, with consequent audio glitches.
Apart from the upgrade, the only thing I needed to do to get the RPi5 to play nicely was to bring in a specific dt overlay for Pisound and RPi5:
dtoverlay=pisound-pi5
in the Hardware → Audio → Driver Config box in the webconf. (It wouldn’t work at all otherwise). I discovered this by looking at the overlay directory in the /boot partition, but perhaps it’s documented somewhere too.
I wasn’t that successful.
On Sunday I played around, connected the Pisound to the Raspberry Pi via the Butterfly gpio two header and cable. And wondered why the Pisound was smoking. Somehow I forgot that the pins on the Butterfly header are crossed. So I put 5V into a pin where it shouldn’t be.
Fortunately, a new Pisound arrived on Friday (I also ordered a pimidi and the Pisound arrived, another mistake I have to deal with).
, I’m not aware of anymore issues and I regularly use the Din interface. No need to tweek anything.