[AudioI] Zero card stopped working -- will order new hardware to troubleshoot

[Matt]

On 1/3/21 12:51 pm, Tom Garwin via People wrote:
> I had finally declared victory over extraneous noise in my remote 
> microphone prototype set-up and was prettying up the power and signal 
> wiring allowing a powered stereo microphone and opamp preamp to be 
> separated from the pi/AI zeros -(-wifi or clock cycles may have been  
> causing interference in the powered mic)   -- but then  the 
> AudioInjector zero card stopped processing sound.
>
> Its failure was accompanied by very strange things so it may be the Pi 
> Zero that failed (or both) rather than the AudioInjector.  I may have 
> not taken adequate precautions against electrostatic shock to the boards.
I feel for you, electrostatics and unknown failures are terrible.
>
> Specifically a set of commands to record the sound on one pi and send 
> it via SSH and aplay it on another stopped working.   I could SSH (by 
> wifi) into the first pi and could ping the second pi and even ssh from 
> the first pi into the second pi so this was strange.  They are both on 
> the same network with a unifi edgerouter with no intervening firewall 
> so that wasn't the problem.
>
> After several reboots ssh was working normally again but the sound on 
> the pi zero was not..   dmesg shows a set of errors that seem to  
> relate to voltages not being present --using default regulator (or 
> something like that) and there is no final  message saying the mapping 
> is ok.  I cannot capture a sound file that has anything but silence in 
> it even though I know the AI Zero board is getting appropriate input. 
>  I also cannot get it to play anything to its output. Nevertheless the 
> aplay -l and arecord -l show entries for the audioinjector and it is 
> the only soundcard in the system. Alsa settings are what they were 
> before.    Of course I did not look at the dmesg output when things 
> were working so I don't know if this is really different.
Are you sure you've setup the mixer settings as required to select the 
line input ?

Normally Linux doesn't have a huge set of monitoring tools for the 
standard LDO regulators on soundcards - some of the power chips have i2c 
ports which are more sophisticated.

One idea which may be helpful is to enable the "line Bypass switch" in 
the alsamixer settings. This will route audio input directly through to 
audio output - at least then you can double check the input signal is 
coming through as expected.


>
> So either I did something to fry the pi or the board or the both, or 
> in trying to fix the problem I updated the OS to a configuration that 
> no longer works.,
>
> I suppose I could start over with a fresh os install and see if that 
> works but at this point I am guessing it is a hardware issue and the 
> pi zero and the AI zero are inexpensive enough relative to my time 
> (and my inadequae software skills) that it's best to just try a fresh 
> AI zero with a different raspberry pi before trying a new software 
> install.

Remember with the latest Raspbian OS they have a non-robust pulse audio 
setup. Some people remove pulse audio entirely. You can also make sure 
you select the audio injector sound card using the

aplay -D hw:0

type of direct device naming methodology.


>
> Will keep this list posted on the results -- Only posting this now on 
> the off chance someone else has had the same symptoms.
>
please do.


> -- 
> Tom Garwin
>
-- 
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