[IDEA] Pirate Audio 240x240 cover display

[bobr80]

I've bought one of the Pimoroni Pirate Audio DAC that has a 1.3" IPS colour LCD (240x240px) (ST7789 driver) Pirate Audio: Line-out for Raspberry Pi
Id love to have the Cover artwork displayed on this, but my coding skills arnt up to it
any chance of this being a future feature?

[TheOldPresbyope]

I've bought one of the Pimoroni Pirate Audio DAC that has a 1.3" IPS colour LCD (240x240px) (ST7789 driver) Pirate Audio: Line-out for Raspberry Pi
Id love to have the Cover artwork displayed on this, but my coding skills arnt up to it
any chance of this being a future feature?

The Pimoroni site says it's an SPI display with an ST7789 driver. 

Given the amount of technical support for these kinds of displays out there, like at Pimoroni and Adafruit, I'd say this is a doable project. 

It's actually one I'm interested in for a small multi-display panel and enclosure I have in mind but I don't have the hardware to play with ATM (nor the quality time to concentrate on a project).

Perhaps someone else who's already playing with similar displays?

Regards,
Kent

[kenling]

I agree that the Mopidy PirateAudio is a pain to setup, and to get artwork a premium Spotify account seems mandatory

Would like to get Moode running with the board, but lack the skills.

Found a thread at Picoreplayer where it seems to have mirrored the frame buffer output https://forums.slimdevices.com/showthrea...240-screen and have got the buttons working as well.
Cheers
Ken

[rusconi]

I've bought one of the Pimoroni Pirate Audio DAC that has a 1.3" IPS colour LCD (240x240px) (ST7789 driver) Pirate Audio: Line-out for Raspberry Pi
Id love to have the Cover artwork displayed on this, but my coding skills arnt up to it
any chance of this being a future feature?

I have tested a ST7735 160x128 TFT with some success, including cover artwork display.
I only use it for listening to internet radio or playing my local FLAC and p3 collection, and I have all my cover art saved as folder.jpg or cover.jpg.
I use the Pimoroni ST7735 python library and the ST7789 library has almost identical, so my script can easily be updated
So if this is what you're after, I can help

I tried already this Mopidy-Thing on the PirateAudio, but it do not think it is fun to use.

It would be really nice to have Moode running on PirateAudio.

Any help to run MOODE here appreciated. I have no clue how to start. Without help  I will not make it.


Anybody else interested?

AtB
Maartin

Maartin,

I don't have a PirateAudio, bit it's predecessor the Pimoroni Phat Dac.

I have had a look at the PirateAudio (they are sold out, unfortunately) and the instructions look reasonably easy.
Like the Phat Dac, the PirateAudio uses the hifiberry-dac overlay, so I would select Pimoroni Phat Dac as your i2s device in the Moode Auduo Config.

As per Pimoroni's instructions, you may also have to edit the config.txt file to configure gpio 25 of the raspberry pi.  This is not difficult


SSH into the rPi.

then edit the config file using the nano editor...

Code:

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

then add this lime at the end...

Code:

gpio=25=op,dh

save the file then reboot.

Bear in mind I cannot guarantee this will work as I don't have a pirateaudio to test it myself.

The worst that could happen is you have to reinstall moode

Cheers

Russ

[rusconi]

Hi Maartin

I'm glad your audio is working.

I have a python script that can display cover art on an ST7735 TFT.
Currently, it will display art empedded in mp3's in your library, folder.jpg/cover.jpg files in your music folders[e.g for FLAC], or the image for internet radios in moode.

The ST7735 and the pirateaudio's ST7789 are supposed to be similar, so with a change in the python display library it should work.

If you're willing to test it, I can put it on github.

Russ

[TheOldPresbyope]

@rusconi

I'd be interested in seeing your script too.

I've been playing with a small (3.5in) HDMI LCD display. moOde already has its local display capability which can drive this but I'm experimenting with a direct-to-framebuffer approach. I'm using pygame as my programming framework and taking advantage of Tim's coverart api to provide the images.

My goal is to have a display similar to moOde's CoverView but with easy (for me) customization like folding in a VU bargraph.

Regards,
Kent

[rusconi]

Hi

@maartin

The script is up on github, at https://github.com/rusconi/tft-cover

Remember, the ST7735 version works for me, but the ST7789 (PirateAudio) version is untested.
I left the pin assignments t the library as per the Pimoroni documentation, so here's hoping.

Also python-musicpd and mutagen require Python3 so it's essential that any other libraries are installed for python 3. e.g use pip3

@TheOldPresbyope 

The script is as basic as my programming skills.

Python is new to me and I only discovered the mutagen library yesterday.
The script only displays embedded images for MP3s. i'm sure it can be expanded to other formats though.

Looking forward to some feedback.

Russ

[rusconi]

Interesting

Mutagen was already installed on my pi

mutagen is python3 only

try

Code:

python3 -m pip install mutagen

or

sudo apt-get install python3-mutagen

Russ

[TheOldPresbyope]

@rusconi

Thanks for sharing.

Python may be new to you but I wouldn't guess it looking at your code

I chose to let Tim's existing coverart API take care of the mucking about with different sources of the images. This left just one special case for me. Pygame doesn't grok .svg so the default moOde image has to be dealt with separately.

Yes, mutagen appears to be in the moOde 6.4.2 libraries but as you say, it's python 3-only, so trying to import it with the Python 2 interpreter will fail.

We're living in this weird interregnum period with Raspbian/Debian 10 (Buster) where invocations like "python" or "pip" still start the v2 instead of the v3 versions, which can confuse the unwary. That's because Debian 10 (Buster) was released 6 months before the sunset date for Python 2. I expect this behavior to go away when Debian 11 is released and Raspbian 11 is built on it.

Anyone writing Python code should be adhering to Python 3 conventions as a matter of course.
 
Regards,
Kent

[rusconi]

@maartin

PHP Code:

pi@moode-pim:~/tft-cover $ python3 cover_7789.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "cover_7789.py", line 18, in <module>
    st7789 = ST7789(rotation=90, port=0, cs=1, dc=9, backlight=19, spi_speed_hz=80 * 1000 * 1000)
TypeError: 'module' object is not callable 


I found an error in my coding and a display class wasn't being created

I have uploaded an update.
It runs for me without any exceptions. Hopefully it will display something on the pirateaudio.

I am also coming to grips with the mutagen library and can get embedded flac covers to display, and soon hope to do the same for other formats.

Russ