Dead? How can I tell?

Hi,
I bought an pi 4b, the pisound hat, and the case. I downloaded patchboxos and flashed it with balena, I put the card in the pi, powered on and…I have a red light. First time I powered on there was quite a bit of green light action. Plugging into a monitor, the monitor says “no HDMI” or “no signal”

I press and hold the big button on top of the pisound for 3 seconds. I get some big red lights flashing. I use pisound app (Bluetooth and location enabled on my phone) and…it doesn’t find anything.

Does anyone know what the next step is to try and figure out what is wrong? Should I dissassemble and flash raspian on the card and check the Pi solo first?

Any help appreciated,
Russell

Hi, I found this tutorial very useful. When you follow it you can check the Pi first, and then Pisound.
About the App, I also had a very hard time to pair it with my device. Sometimes helps to load the Modep module to pair the devices, and then switch to whatever other module you want (PD in my case)

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Try using this image: [Beta] Patchbox OS image 2020-11-23

Take it one step at a time - first ensure that you’re getting visual display and you can control the system using your mouse & keyboard, alternatively you may use ethernet cable and ssh or remote desktop like VNC to access the device. Once that is sorted out, then move on to putting on the Pisound and installing the software you want to use, etc…

Yeah, I think I have to start over. Foolishly (after years of having dabbled with linux, and 20 years as professional programmer, you’d think I’d have learned!) and naively I believed it would all just work.

FWIW, after some patience, I got the pisound app to connect to the unit. I still can’t get display out of the Pi, but once I can shell into it, I guess that won’t matter as much. I suspect the hdmi cable that PiHut sent as part of the pi4b starter kit, it barely connects through the case walls.

But I am downloading the image you linked to, will try that next. Thanks!

About the HDMI, I also have a micro adapter that’s too big to fit thru the case.
What I do, to check the Pi and Pisound, is to build the case without the part labeled I (the jack side), and use the second HDMI port (my adapter is too big to fit both power and HDMI first port :sweat_smile: )

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Woo, ok, so I tried the beta image and got nothing. I went back to the stable image, plugged in an ethernet cable, booted, and went for lunch, when I came back I held the BIG button for 3 seconds, I was able to connect the app, get the IP address and finally shell into the unit. So, it works! I can’t get a monitor signal, but it works. No to figure out how to use this thing!

Thanks all for the help
Cheers
Russell

I take it back. It won’t boot since I shut it down yesterday. No green light activity at all. Money says if I reflash the card it will boot.

EDIT: Ok, I reflashed, and now I have green light. Which means I have to go through all the setup again. When I shutdown yesterday I did sudo shutdown. That’s all. But the seems to have corrupted the data on the SD card to such an extent it won’t boot. With no access to the machine via monitor/keyboard it’s essentially a black box.

I think I made a huge mistake, for some reason the website and the appearance of quality made me think this wasn;t the typical linux/RPI serial disasters of non-stop troubleshooting, never actually using.

Anyone want to buy a brand new RPI 4B and PiSound in official case? used once.
Russell

Use the beta image if you’re running on Pi 4’s - they’re known to have issues with USB and booting again after initial restart.

Hey, thanks so much. And sorry for my petulance above. That was no way to introduce myself to this community. Using the beta works for me. What is the trade off here, does it mean I don’t get the real time kernel? Will that hamper performance at all?

In theory, the realtime kernel should allow for lower audio buffer sizes to be set for lower latency, but you can set them quite low using the stock kernel too, so I wouldn’t worry about it.

Once there’s a compatible and stable RT kernel available, we’ll make it available via the utility. It’s been a while with not much progress in the RPi community though.

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