Success Cases

Waveshare 8DP-CAPLCD, original, not fake.
The nice surprise is, it can even work via a single USB-C on a laptop if Zynthian is not powered/not sending signal over HDMI. This feature is not documented anywhere. But it gives the extra use for the Zynthian on the desktop.

I probably don’t understand. You mean you power the Zynthian from a USB port of a laptop? But the Pi is sending HDMI to the display, right? I can see it can be mounted on the back of the display and connected by simple HDMI-to-microHDMI connector ā€œbridgeā€. But how about the USB for touch and power of the display? Connected by a conventional cable to USB-A port of the Pi? And then power the Pi by connecting its USB-C connector into your laptop?

Update: Oh sorry, I see - there is another bridge at the side of the USB-A connectors! And you power them both via the Pi USB-C or via the display power connector?

No, the screen of this Zynthian can work as an external touchscreen monitor for a laptop, using a single USB-C cable with DisplayPort functionality, if the Zynthian is in standby or powered off.
Inside the Zynthian, the display is connected to the Pi 5 via Micro-HDMI to HDMI flat cable and USB2 for power supply and touch. The PI is wrapped in a cooler, so can not be fixed to the display as intended by the display-maker.
The Zynthian needs to get big 5 Amps at 5 Volts from a power brickj.

Wow! That’s great! How do you connect it to the laptop then? Via the ā€œpowerā€ connector on the display? Is it also a USB-C connector with support for a DP input?

the touch connector has a DP that can be activated via the supplied OSD in factory menu

I see. But then you have to physically swap the cables, don’t you? You cannot have it attached both to the Pi and the laptop at the same time.

breakout cable.
For the touch USB needs a switch, to switch two wires between two ends, no need to disconnect DP because this is not sent by Pi 5. For power, make two ideal diodes from mosfets, so power can come from PI 5 or USB-C.

What do you use for the passive cooling?

a passive cooler block (modified armor case) with additional heat spreader/radiator mounted on top (thermal grease!), recycled heat pipe from an old laptop cooler

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Cool. I was thinking of using an armour case with a heat spreader but didn’t know if it would be enough. Thanks :slight_smile:

Super cool @fussl!

Please post pictures of this. I am sure many custom builders will be interested in heat management. I am building a 2U rack mount zynth and need to consider where and how to port the exhaust. Maybe start a new topic on cooling solutions.

I’d like to see pictures of your rack mount Zynthian too :slight_smile:

Today I did actually modify the cooler, the cheapest Armor Case and on top I cut four threads between the fins, added MX-5 thermal goo and bolted a sheet of 295x120x2mm aluminium tread plate on top (flat side towards Armor Case, tread outside as some kind of cooling fins). Only for the two USB-ā€˜Towers’ I had to make cutouts, to allow the sheet to sit flush on the fins of the Armor Case. This forms now the bottom lid of the enclosure, instead of the original acrylic, Pi5 inside is now upside-down. Heat transfer is now even better, temperatures never exceed 41.7°C, whatever heats the Pi5. Silicone rubber feet protect the table from scratches. The mirror appearance of the inside is beautiful together with the clear acrylic. Need more light inside :star_struck: Photos will come the next days.
With this mod I sacrificed a bit of transparency for better cooling of the Zynthian, even less weight now and a bit more room inside to add some gimmicks, like a proper power-control on-off logic, or Toslink Audio, or an aptX-LL/LDAC transmitter for wireless headphones.

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Greetings to everyone. It’s been a long time and i have been quite busy. In the meantime, I’ve been rebuilding my fleet. Those are 2 Zynthian-Raspberry Pi4 with 4.3 and 5 inches display, the official V5 i won in the composing competition, and a big 7 inches display with a Raspberry Pi5. Next step should be to upgrade the red beauty with a Raspberry Pi5. And i hope to release some new music soon.

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excellent :+1:

Another opportunity for me to start wittering on about multiple zynth rigs…

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Go on…

:laughing:

Not yet a success case but just a WIP after having found that 50cts metal case


There is room enough inside for a kind of v5 build and for testing this cs42448 board :sweat_smile:

Unfortunately, Mr Happy will have a really bad time under the Dremel (sorry bro)

[edit]and I’ll have to buy my first RBPi5 for that ! [/edit]

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Poor Mr Happy! It will be sad to sacrifice such a wonderful tin.

First of all, if you have an official rechargeable RTC battery connected to the Pi5, put a line with
dtparam=rtc_bbat_vchg=3000000
into Display config (advanced view). This will enable the battery charger and prevent over-discharging and destroying the RTC battery.
You may want to change dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d into dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d-pi5 for better performance.

If you use a HifiBerry DAC2 ADC Pro, edit audio config to

dtoverlay=hifiberry-dacplusadc,slave
force_eeprom_read=0

the slave will avoid crackles due to unsynced I2S clocks and will drastically reduce audio jitter, which sounds better.

While munching through several tests with testing(Vangelis) I found out the testing repository breaks Wi-Fi permanently (!) even and especially after update, that means it stays broken, even if repository is reverted to stable(Oram)!
I’ve boiled it down to wpa_supplicant, which gets updated to a broken version.
The last working version for Pi5 is 2.10.! This is with ! and !
so I’ve put package wpasupplicant (sic!) on hold via terminal:

apt-mark hold wpasupplicant

Then the usual

sync

to etch the changes into the filesystem by clearing cache, and to verify:

dpkg --get-selections wpasupplicant

In the unlikely case one wants to risk it again: apt-mark unhold wpasupplicant
but this is really not a good idea until they fix this package.

More things, some of them really bite, is how the Zynthian software handles Wi-Fi reg domain, touchscreen, Bluetooth, etc. Settings made in raspi-config are wiped frequently (webconf,update,…), but they are necessary to make Wi-Fi work at good speed and range and with all frequencies. Unset reg DFS leaves Wi-Fi crippled to a safe generic minimum.

To repair all this, I’ve installed:

sudo apt-get install uhubctl

Uhubctl is necessary to make USB-touchscreen work.
Edit: Bluez seems to make other problems with Wi-Fi… so do not install now.

With nano I’ve written a file named /zynthian/config/zynthian_custom_config.sh with contents (change timezone and wifi_country to your place):

#!/bin/bash
sudo raspi-config nonint do_change_timezone Europe/Berlin
sudo raspi-config nonint do_change_locale en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
sudo raspi-config nonint do_wifi_country DE
uhubctl -l 3 -p 2 -a 0

Omit the uhubctl -l 3 -p 2 -a 0 if you do not have a WaveShare (or clone) HDMI/USB touchscreen connected. Change -p 2 for the lower black USB port to -p 1 if you connect it to the upper black USB port.
Dont forget to

chmod a+x /zynthian/config/zynthian_custom_config.sh

that file, otherwise it won’t be run and won’t have any effect.

And just for the case that you want to ever use Webconf again, which will delete the file, prepare a backup copy of it as well.

cp /zynthian/config/zynthian_custom_config.sh /zynthian/config/zynthian_custom_config.sh.bak

With the help of autocompletion it is easily copied and restored in Terminal.
You have to restore it via Terminal always before you leave Webconf or reboot from there, or you will be locked out of your Zynthian, which will not connect to Wi-Fi Network on higher channels or at larger distance any more.

@jofemodo
Too many things in issue tracker.

I’ve written this in some how-to style for people who have not so much to do with Linux, to help them reach a working system. Soory, Nerds.

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