Dietpi & Terra-Berry DAC+ Install?

Audio Gear Talk DietPi
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I’m trying to get an old Terra-Berry(T-B) DAC HaT working with Dietpi on a RPi 3/4 . Probably not too many users of that DAC HaT anymore, but thought I’d ask. It’s been sitting in my DAC HaTs graveyard box, where old HaTs go to die. I’m trying to resurrect it and get it playing again for an endpoint. IIRC it did work yrs ago with Dietpi and Roonbridge installed.

After configuring Dietpi I then install roonbridge and it completes w/o issue and reports that the service is running. However, when I go to set up the T-B endpoint in roon (Setting/Audio), I can see the RPi(IP address), but the only sound device shown is the bcm2835 - that is of course the audio out jack on the RPi. The DAC itself is not seen, and therefore not configurable in roon, because the primary interface I2S is never found. This has never been an issue with any DAC HaT I’ve used over the past 8 yrs - and that’s been many. :open_mouth: I have tried multiple micoSD cards, multiple versions of DietPi and with multiple RPi 3s and 4s to no avail. I’ve even tried using the two different roonbridge install scripts provided by roon, and still nothing.

I know the T-B HaT works because when using the latest Ropieee software it works and plays fine. So, it would appear that there’s an issue with Dietpi and what overlay they are using now with newer DAC HaTs?

Ideas anyone?

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The respective device tree overlay to enable and configure I2S on the respective GPIO pins is likely missing. Check /boot/firmware/overlays/README

I do not see any Terra-Berry DAC to be supported directly, but there is the generic i2s-dac overlay. Hence maybe this works:

G_SUDO G_CONFIG_INJECT 'dtoverlay=i2s-dac' 'dtoverlay=i2s-dac' /boot/firmware/config.txt

RoPieee probably enables a bunch of audio related features or overlays automatically in their kernel builds/images, since it is a distro focused on audio applications. We use the official RPi OS kernel builds, with no overlay enabled OOTB.

Maybe there is some setup documentation from Terra-Berry about how this needs to be enabled on RPi OS? The same should work on DietPi. Just be sure to use the modern path /boot/firmware/config.txt for boot configuration.

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Thanks much. That’s was my thinking as well, and I did go poking around, to see where the dtoverlay assignment is stored. I think the generic i2s-dac should work, so I’ll give that one a try.

Update: Bingo! Made the edit to config.txt and voila. Terry-BerryDAC2+ singing nicely. It really had some chops back in the day. Still does. :slightly_smiling_face: Adds new life to an older RPi 3.

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