ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT to Raspberry Pi

General Discussion
1

Hi All,

I have a Raspberry Pi Zero v2 with DietPi installed.
I would like to get “ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT to Raspberry Pi” from SeedStudio running on it. (sound card)
Have tried installing ALSA and the drivers for the HAT but “aplay -l” shows “no sound cards”.
Any help would be appreciated.
Many Thanks

2

Maybe something @MichaIng could help with

3

Might need drivers/application for the hat…

The problem might be, it’s taylor made for raspbian, not DietPi
And in the install.sh script, it seems to enable i2s as well

Also…might take a peek at the wiki

4

Thank you WarHawk.
I have tested it on various Debian versions now and it seems the drivers does not work on Bookworm and Bullseye. It does work on Buster.
DietPi does not support Debian Buster anymore so I will have to reach out to SeedStudio and see if there are any updates available.

5

Well it’s not supported by Debian and reached EOL last year in general Debian -- Debian “buster” Release Information

6

Yeah that install script requires updates for recent RPi OS versions and the new firmware stack.

@JohanChristiaan did you migrate to the new firmware stack already, as offered by the last DietPi updates?

dpkg -l | grep linux-
7

Thank you for the suggestion Michalng.
I have started all over again installing the latest versions of everything and then tried to install the drivers for ReSpeaker 2-Mics. It did not work.
As I mentioned earlier, the drivers does not seem to even work on the latest Raspbian Bookworm.

8

As said, this cannot work as the ReSpeaker installation script needs an update. You would require an RPi system with old Bullseye/Linux 6.1 kernel and firmware stack, which we however removed from our downloads in the meantime.

Yes, same problem there. It should work with Raspberry Pi OS legacy, which ships with Bullseye and the old kernel. But I would rather talk to ReSpeaker support and ask them to update their installer script. Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm has been released 2 years ago, and soon Debian Trixie is coming, which means the old Bullseye downloads will be gone.

9

Thank you MichaIng.

This is a general problem with ReSpeaker after doing a lot of research into it. It also seems a lot of people started experiencing audio hardware related problems with the latest Linux kernels. Not sure what happened.
The Seeed group which produces the ReSpeaker does not seem to be very proactive in producing up-to-date drivers for their products. It is so bad that on their official website they recommend you download a hacked version based on an older kernel version of the driver from a private individual who is not part of the company. Really? (This also did not work for me)
I think it is probably better to look at alternate hardware.
Thank you all for your input and trying to help. Much appreciated.

10

Sadly so common. For installer scripts it is one thing, but if drivers are not updated either, and there is no efforts to merge them into mainline Linux, then someone with general Linux shell and OS knowledge cannot fix it either. More nasty customers are needed who push their support, and in case vendors to take back the product, still sold but not usable with recent OS, if there is any local warranty regulations beyond manufacturere one :sweat_smile:. I know difficult if the hardware itself is not actually defective.