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Support for Botic Linux driver

If you do not need 352/384 sample rates you can try to update botic first to stable and then to testing. But I expect many non-trivial issues to solve, so I do not recommend this one.

Good morning miero.

I have a reply...

HQPlayer NAA is now based on Stretch; it is preferred because of the 'DSD ready' kernel which makes it easy for people with few Linux skills to get a NAA solution working, just install networkaudiod on top of a Stretch image, which is great if you're using a USB board that is supported by the kernel.

To get a Botic NAA it looks like you have to take the route that you don't recommend. I have your Botic 5 distro running so I'll try upgrading to Jessie as the first step. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I guess you'll update to Jessie/Stretch for your Botic distro at some point?

Any guidance/suggestions?

Ray
 
Hi miero.

Given the previous news that the fixed release of NAA is available only for Debian Stretch and wont be back-ported to Jessie or Wheezy, I've been thinking about at least trying to use Botic on Stretch - nothing ventured, nothing gained.

There would seem to be two possible routes (both of which are likely to be rocky);

1. Install a fresh Debian Stretch ISO image onto a BBB and then try to boticize it.
2. Start with Botic 5 on Debian Wheezy and then incrementally update to Jessie and then Stretch.

You seemed to indicate #2 as your suggested way forward?

Am I the only one interested in trying to get Botic working as a HQPlayer NAA?

Ray
 
I would like to see/hear that working, but my own setup would also need multichannel output with good crossover filters running in HQPlayer. Thus, for now, my agenda is fixed in order to get up and running using less ambitious customization. Best regards, Frank
 
nautibuoy, please try the #1 but it should be enough to use just following steps from boticize manual (because you will be using NAA):


cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list <<EOT
deb http://repo.ieero.com/ wheezy main
EOT

apt-get update
apt-get install linux-image-4.0.0-botic5

cp -f /boot/vmlinuz-4.0.0-botic5 /boot/zImage
cp -f /boot/dtbs/4.0.0-botic5/am335x-boneblack.dtb /boot/dtbs/am335x-boneblack.dtb
good luck!
 
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Hi Miero, I'm trying to use your botic kernel with Volumio 1.5 on my BBB. I have followed all your steps in the 'How To' guide and get to reboot command without experiencing any errors. However when I do the reboot the BBB doesn't boot up. When power is applied I get two solid blue LED's and that's it.

I'm not changing anything in the uEnv.txt file prior to doing the reboot - do I need to change anything at this point?

What I'm trying to do is get I2S output working into my DDDAC 1794. I already have your driver working with a cronus board and Squeezlite, but wanted to give Volumio a try on a different BBB without using a re-clocking board.
 
Stage 1 accomplished. I've installed a clean debian stretch image on my BBB and have networkaudio installed and running. I can see the device as a NAA in HQPlayer and have sent PCM data to it. It seems to be working correctly but I will run what I've done past Jussi at Signalyst to check a couple of things.

I've kept a log of what I've done and if it all works out I'll publish a summary here.

Next up - try and Boticize it.

Later

Ray
 
I seem to have had some success with boticizing the Debian Stretch build but I'm not home and dry yet. I can see the Botic NAA in HQPlayer and it appears to be functioning in that I can see the ALSA options available etc. but I have encountered a NAA error. Have passed all the relevant information to Jussi, hoping he can assist. I'll await his response before going further.

Ray
 
Hello miero.

I've moved forward a little. Following Jussi's advice I've done a reinstall and appear to now have the BBB stable as a HQPlayer NAA in that it no longer crashes and is visible to HQPlayer, however, Its not working properly yet and, to my inexperienced eye, it looks as though I'm encountering the Botic compatibility issues you predicted? Some advice would be very much appreciated.

First things first though, I've attached a PDF document, which is a copy of the steps I have taken to get to the current BBB build.

So now, as I say, I can run NAA and haven't managed to crash it. Also attached is an extract from the networkaudiod screen output and it appears to be saying that there are problems with the initialising of ALSA for playback. The obvious error is about 'snd_pcm_format_physical_width' (which sounds like a botic type thing?) but it also looks as though no DSD capability is present? Hopefully you'll be able to give some insight as to what is happening.

Many thanks

Ray
 

Attachments

  • BBB NAA - how to.pdf
    BBB NAA - how to.pdf
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  • NAA_ALSA_1.jpg
    NAA_ALSA_1.jpg
    74.7 KB · Views: 302
Hello miero.

I've moved forward a little. Following Jussi's advice I've done a reinstall and appear to now have the BBB stable as a HQPlayer NAA in that it no longer crashes and is visible to HQPlayer, however, Its not working properly yet and, to my inexperienced eye, it looks as though I'm encountering the Botic compatibility issues you predicted? Some advice would be very much appreciated.

First things first though, I've attached a PDF document, which is a copy of the steps I have taken to get to the current BBB build.

So now, as I say, I can run NAA and haven't managed to crash it. Also attached is an extract from the networkaudiod screen output and it appears to be saying that there are problems with the initialising of ALSA for playback. The obvious error is about 'snd_pcm_format_physical_width' (which sounds like a botic type thing?) but it also looks as though no DSD capability is present? Hopefully you'll be able to give some insight as to what is happening.

Many thanks

Ray

Many thanks, Ray.

Cheers
 
Thanks for pressing on with this Ray, your efforts are much appreciated 🙂

I'm holding out for Squeezebox support which looks pretty likely in the next release of Roon. Then I can run Squeezelite on the botic/bbb (I already have this set up as I use LMS to handle my media), use Roon as the media library interface and botic as the player. It'll be pcm only for now, but as I have a redbook music collection and an excellent dddac I'm more than happy with that for now until this new wave of direct dsd dacs get released.
 
Hi to all!

First I would like to thank Miero for his unbelievable work on the driver and his distro, without you this all would have been all not possible! I think you are changing the world of (open source) setting a new standard of playing music the best possible way!

Now to my problem:
First I thought it was hardware-related, but now I think it is somewhere in the software.
When I play music, the playback often gets interrupted. Then mpd is not accessable through ympd or any android-mpc or Cantata as mpc tool.
But in this time I can access via ssh to BBB, no problem.

In the beginning I mounted my QNAP NAS with NFS, because both devices are linux and this protocol is less resource hungry than cifs. But this only works when mounting manually via ssh, whenever I put this into fstab, BBB didn't responded. For me this was some strange conflict of userrights.
Then I changed to cifs, and it worked without problems. Now I have put it into fstab.
But still the hickups are there.
The NAS is more or less idle and is quite modern, so it should handle this task easily.

My configuration is the following:
Code:
for i in /sys/module/snd_soc_botic/parameters/*; do echo "* $i"; cat $i; done 
* /sys/module/snd_soc_botic/parameters/blr_ratio 
64 
* /sys/module/snd_soc_botic/parameters/clk_44k1 
45158400 
* /sys/module/snd_soc_botic/parameters/clk_48k 
49152000 
* /sys/module/snd_soc_botic/parameters/dai_format 
16385 
* /sys/module/snd_soc_botic/parameters/dsd_format_switch 
1 
* /sys/module/snd_soc_botic/parameters/ext_masterclk 
3 
* /sys/module/snd_soc_botic/parameters/helper_cmd 
* /sys/module/snd_soc_botic/parameters/pinconfig 
default 
* /sys/module/snd_soc_botic/parameters/serconfig 
MMMM


Do you have an idea where to begin?
Many thanks
Matthias
 
Hi Miero, and also one hallo to all others,

Botic on BBB runs just amazingly fine!
Before I post my problem, one big advise to all:
If you have in mpd.conf still the mixer on "software", change it to none or hardware. The difference is amazing and easily hearable!

So, then I tried to use the volume control of the DAC chip and followed Miero's post #706
(If have Botic5 installed, downloaded the script (botic_helper), made it executable (
Code:
chmod +x
), bot it doesn't work.

Code:
i2cdump -r 0-31 -y 1 0x48 b
puts out he following:
Code:
0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  a  b  c  d  e  f    0123456789abcdef 
00: XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX    XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 
10: XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX    XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
If I try out alsamixer, I can see "MasterTrim", but there's just some noise and it goes back to "0" every time. Changing the Volume with my MPC client also hasn't now effect, but the slider for volume is there.

Any suggestions? Thanks for the help!
All the best
Matthias

PS:
Did I miss to edit the helper script somehow?
 
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The default software mixer probably resamples, and may do so poorly (like dmix); or do reclocking on a very short-term scale (which can result in similar output, but not quite as bad). A properly configured Pulse and/or Jack mixing setup can do very well, but can also take some time to get right, and may use a lot of CPU. With just one program playing things back 99.9% of the time, hardware is probably best.

I need to get mine all wired together, and get it playing music, rather than occasional test sounds 🙂.
 
Doesn't anybody has an idea?
If you look back in this thread, you'll see that I attempted to do the same thing. I wish I'd never bothered now, as not only did it not work but I then had no volume control at all. Subsequently, Botic stopped working completely and now I have a non - functional system.

Sometimes it's best to be happy if things are working. It seems that only the real technical experts are the ones with no issues (and even some of them have difficulties!).