Back when Blokas was starting up I purchased a Pisound v1.0 back in 2017. Never did get around to using it until recently, when I got myself an RPi5, running Zynthian on it. Zynthian seems to have full support for Pisound; it’s one of the potential soundcards listed in the audio configuration for Zynthian, although I had to select a different devicetree overlay specifically for the RPi5.
The audio part seems to work fine, but when trying DIN MIDI (in) I get dropped and hanging notes. I seem to recall that the MIDI interface uses an MCU which communicates with the RPi using SPI. So I’m wondering if the firmware in the MCU might need an upgrade, considering how old my Pisound is. Or is it something that cannot be upgraded? Can’t really see any information in the forums about it, so I’m guessing it’s not possible, but thought I’d ask just the same.
Good guess, you must be running an old firmware version on your Pisound.
See here for info on upgrading the firmware: Pisound + Raspberry Pi 5: Hanging MIDI Notes - #6 by Giedrius
The scripts are not compatible with Pi 5 or bookworm OS, to make the upgrade, please use Pi 2, Pi 3 or Pi 4 and use the older Raspberry Pi OS, based on bullseye or buster Debian versions.
It very likely is old, I think this was one of the first Pisounds, funded by Kickstarter if I remember correctly.
Thanks for the info on upgrading, I’ve got a Pi3 lying around that I might try with, otherwise, it looks like the core of the upgrade is a device tree overlay which brings in the SPI device so that avrdude can use it with the appropriate .hex file with the firmware.
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The differences between Pi 5 and older models also include different GPIO numbering at the OS level, at least it was like that initially on Pi 5 release. I think at some point they decided to make it match, to make things more compatible, but I haven’t rechecked this since then.