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Digi no longer seen by RPI 4B on raspbian buster

Joe Diesel

February 17, 2022 15:58

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Dear All,

All of a sudden, I got no sound coming out of my raspberry with the hifiberry digi I/O card in it, and started trying to understand what the reason could be. Nothing had been changed, and the device had not been rebooted.
Well, I did reboot to see what would happen, and could not remote connect (RDP) to the raspberry as I usually can. I just got the remote login prompt, and then after that a light blue screen. I could still access via SSH though.
I then had a quick look at disk usage, and noticed that the root partition was 100 % full. Not sure why as I´ve downloaded nothing for months, and it´s a 16 GB card. Anyway, I got rid of a couple of log files, and managed to free up enough memory (200 mb) to reboot and now see the desktop via RDP as I would before.
I then started REAPER, my main reason to have the hifiberry card, but realized that I could no longer select the hifiberry device.
I shut down REAPER, and in a terminal I ran aplay -L. To my frustration, this is all I got:

null
    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
jack
    JACK Audio Connection Kit
default
sysdefault:CARD=SE49
    Default Audio Device
usbstream:CARD=SE49
    SE49
    USB Stream Output

No indications of hifiberry present in the system.
I then did:

nano /boot/config.txt

Which showed me that hifiberry is still loaded:

dtoverlay=hifiberry-digi

And I checked that the overlay file for this board is still present in the overlays folder.

Before I do a clean installation on a new SD card, as the old one could have become corrupted, with hours and hours of trying to tweak and configure everything the way it used to be, could someone advise me about whether if there´s something I can do at this point? Maybe I need more free memory for the driver to load? Am I missing something?
I have the feeling that there´s nothing wrong with the card, since the problem started happening while I had other issues, but one can´t be too sure, of course.

Thanks in advance!

Best Regards

Jesper

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17 comments

• 0
  
  Andy Pastuszak February 17, 2022 21:30

  I'm having the same problem with my DAC2 HD.

  I think this is because of the 5.15 kernel.

  What's the output of uname -a?

• 0
  
  Joe Diesel February 17, 2022 22:08

  It tells me this:
  
  Linux raspberrypi 5.4.83-v7l+ #1379 SMP Mon Dec 14 13:11:54 GMT 2020 armv7l GNU/Linux
  
  How about you?
  
  

  Edited by Joe Diesel February 18, 2022 07:25
• 0
  
  Joe Diesel February 19, 2022 13:11

  Anybody else? Is there a log, that I should show here or other ways to determine whats going on?

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team February 20, 2022 08:28

  Best is to try a fresh installation on a new SD card. This often fixes problems and save you  lot of time.

• 0
  
  Joe Diesel March 03, 2022 22:59

  Done. I added
  
  

  force_eeprom_read=0
  dtoverlay=hifiberry-digi

   

  to config.txt, in which I also did:

  # dtparam=audio=on

  aplay -l gives me:

  pi@raspberrypi:/boot $ aplay -l
  **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
  card 0: vc4hdmi0 [vc4-hdmi-0], device 0: MAI PCM i2s-hifi-0 [MAI PCM i2s-hifi-0]
    Subdevices: 1/1
    Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
  card 2: vc4hdmi1 [vc4-hdmi-1], device 0: MAI PCM i2s-hifi-0 [MAI PCM i2s-hifi-0]
    Subdevices: 1/1
    Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

  Whats the next thing to try?

   

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team March 04, 2022 10:33

  This is a fresh installation on a new SD card?
  
  Try dmesg | grep -i hifiberry

• 0
  
  Joe Diesel March 06, 2022 16:40

  Indeed it is:

  pi@raspberrypi:/boot $ dmesg | grep -i hifiberry
  pi@raspberrypi:/boot $

   

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team March 06, 2022 17:28

  Something is probably wrong with your installation as it seem no driver is loaded at all. 

• 0
  
  Joe Diesel March 06, 2022 23:48

  Ok, so I guess the best way is to show you my config.txt, which should be the only place where I´d need to take any steps for the installation, right?

  # For more options and information see
  # http://rpf.io/configtxt
  # Some settings may impact device functionality. See link above for details
  
  # uncomment if you get no picture on HDMI for a default "safe" mode
  #hdmi_safe=1
  
  # uncomment the following to adjust overscan. Use positive numbers if console
  # goes off screen, and negative if there is too much border
  #overscan_left=16
  #overscan_right=16
  #overscan_top=16
  #overscan_bottom=16
  
  # uncomment to force a console size. By default it will be display's size minus
  # overscan.
  #framebuffer_width=1280
  #framebuffer_height=720
  
  # uncomment if hdmi display is not detected and composite is being output
  #hdmi_force_hotplug=1
  
  # uncomment to force a specific HDMI mode (this will force VGA)
  #hdmi_group=1
  #hdmi_mode=1
  
  # uncomment to force a HDMI mode rather than DVI. This can make audio work in
  # DMT (computer monitor) modes
  #hdmi_drive=2
  
  # uncomment to increase signal to HDMI, if you have interference, blanking, or
  # no display
  #config_hdmi_boost=4
  
  # uncomment for composite PAL
  
  
  #sdtv_mode=2
  
  #uncomment to overclock the arm. 700 MHz is the default.
  #arm_freq=800
  
  # Uncomment some or all of these to enable the optional hardware interfaces
  #dtparam=i2c_arm=on
  #dtparam=i2s=on
  #dtparam=spi=on
  
  # Uncomment this to enable infrared communication.
  #dtoverlay=gpio-ir,gpio_pin=17
  #dtoverlay=gpio-ir-tx,gpio_pin=18
  
  # Additional overlays and parameters are documented /boot/overlays/README
  
  # Enable audio (loads snd_bcm2835)
  # dtparam=audio=on
  
  # Automatically load overlays for detected cameras
  camera_auto_detect=1
  
  # Automatically load overlays for detected DSI displays
  display_auto_detect=1
  
  # Enable DRM VC4 V3D driver
  dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d
  max_framebuffers=2
  
  # Run in 64-bit mode
  arm_64bit=1
  
  # Disable compensation for displays with overscan
  disable_overscan=1
  
  
  
  [cm4]
  # Enable host mode on the 2711 built-in XHCI USB controller.
  # This line should be removed if the legacy DWC2 controller is required
  # (e.g. for USB device mode) or if USB support is not required.
  otg_mode=1
  
  [all]
  
  [pi4]
  # Run as fast as firmware / board allows
  arm_boost=1
  
  [all]
  force_eeprom_read=0
  dtoverlay=hifiberry-digi
  
  

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team March 07, 2022 14:57

  config.txt looks fine. Unfortunately I can't say why your system doesn't even try to load the driver.

• 0
  
  Joe Diesel March 07, 2022 15:08

  Thanks, so if the card is no longer seen, would you still expect to see any output when using dmesg | grep -i hifiberry?

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team March 07, 2022 15:09

  If the driver is initialised, you should see some message, even if it fails to initialize

• 0
  
  Joe Diesel March 07, 2022 22:16

  Well, this is a brandnew installation of buster 64-bit made with raspberry pi installer with no tweaks or changes except for installing xrdp and doing:

  sudo gpasswd -d pi render
  sudo gpasswd -d pi video
  
  These were needed in order for xrdp to work.
  
  One thing I just came across though is this, that I now get with uname -a:

  Linux raspberrypi 5.10.92-v8+ #1514 SMP PREEMPT Mon Jan 17 17:39:38 GMT 2022 aarch64 GNU/Linux

  In my previous installation, it said armv7I

  Linux raspberrypi 5.4.83-v7l+ #1379 SMP Mon Dec 14 13:11:54 GMT 2020 armv7l GNU/Linux

  Is there a possibility that this new version has a flaw in terms of reporting hardware detection?

   

   

   

   

   

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team March 08, 2022 10:47

  We haven't heard of any issues, but a lot is possible. Did you check that the overlay exists?

• 0
  
  Joe Diesel March 09, 2022 00:44

  Indeed it does:
  
  pi@raspberrypi:/boot/overlays $ ls hifiberry*
  hifiberry-amp100.dtbo  hifiberry-dac.dtbo         hifiberry-dacplusadcpro.dtbo  hifiberry-dacplus.dtbo    hifiberry-digi.dtbo
  hifiberry-amp.dtbo     hifiberry-dacplusadc.dtbo  hifiberry-dacplusdsp.dtbo     hifiberry-dacplushd.dtbo  hifiberry-digi-pro.dtbo

• 0
  
  Joe Diesel March 09, 2022 00:49

  I should add that I just tried ssh´ing into my libreelec pi, that has a hifiberry DAC board on it, which also did not show anything when doing dmesg | grep -i hifiberry.

  This board however works.

   

• 0
  
  Joe Diesel March 18, 2022 01:07

  Good news! I decided to test the board on another pi, so I found an old model 3b, that I installed the hifiberry digi on and inserted the SD-card from my libreelec machine (only other 3b device I have, and knowing that the installation worked fine with the hifiberry DAC board) into it. I then altered config.txt to hifiberry-digi and checked with aplay -l: hifiberry showed up!
  I then reinstalled the hifiberry digi on the pi with the problems, using the old sdcard where I originally started having the problem, and suddenly everything was working again.
  Not sure what happened here, cause the pi hasn´t been physically touched at all, so I see no way that the board would have popped up in a way so that it no longer was connected. Also, indeed it felt as if it was well connected when I moved it to the other pi.