“I absolutely love this board. It's the second one i've purchased to resurrect an old radio. This time on a pi3b. My only reason to drop a star is the software isn't as 'plug n play' as when first released. Pimoroni are continuing to maintain it and react fast to technical support queries. I found it needed to install legacy bookworm to eventually get it working after a day of forums. I use it in conjunction with Home Assistant Music Assistant and it's great with snapserver on home assistant and sbap client on a pi, producing perfectly synchronised multi room music. I'll probably buy another one shortly. Please keep the software updates coming Pimoroni A great board.”
“Very pleased with this purchase. The sound quality through the 3 inch Pimoroni speakers is great. The push in speaker connectors are not so great. It took me ages to get the tinned ends of the speakers lined up perfectly to go in. Single core solid wire is a lot easier to insert. Pimoroni should replace those connectors with something better.
For software I used PiCorePlayer which is brilliant. I am so pleased I discovered it. The 240x240 display works beautifully. Follow the guide at https://forums.slimdevices.com/forum/user-forums/linux-unix/108174-jivelite-on-a-pirate-audio-240x240-screen?p=1421255#post1421255
Be sure to follow the guide to the letter on a clean install of PiCorePlayer.”
“I already had two of these and this is my third, so that tells you something straight away.
Overall I'd say this is a good board if it suits your needs but if there is ever a version 2, things I would like to see are: 1/ screw terminals to attach the speakers, because the push clips are fiddly and it is hard to get both + and - connections to open at the same time 2/ switch to a DAC which has a real software volume control (you can configure asound to do this but you have to play an (empty) file at full volume after each reboot, which is a bit of a faff and 3/ (and this one is true for a lot of hats) make it easier to break out the (majority) of unused gpio pins. After all, you never know when you are going to _need_ to add a Rick Roll button, and 4 buttons is pretty much the minimum you need to have some kind of control over an audio player.
Talking of buttons, I wound up buying board number 3 after knocking the retaining plastic off the top of one of the buttons when the button caught on the edge of the screen cutout in the case I made for it. If you take care during your build and leave a sensible margin for the buttons this won't happen to you.
The sound coming out of the board is great and is plenty powerful enough to drive the honking 1960s speaker which I have retained in my radio conversion project. Fwiw the suggested speakers work well and have decent top end without descending into tizz.
After nearly 3 years the little screen has started to flicker and sometimes does not display but I suspect this is not an inherent fault and more likely due to poor circuit design in the breakout board I added to the radio conversion project so I could control volume using a rotary encoder.
If you are looking for a board for audio and a display for a quick build that doesn't need anything else other than a Raspberry Pi to drive it, this is definitely a good choice.”
“Very good. Works great in a mp3 player with a Pi. Sounds good with some reasonable speakers. I would give it 5* if the first one received hadn't been faulty, Pimoroni were very quick to replace it.”
