“It's a lovely looking thing (screen is gorgeous) but the method chosen to connect speakers is unfortunately (for me at least) a disaster. Expanding a tiny hole to take the tinned wires took me about 30 minutes. Pressing down on the plastic meant I was deforming it and with each attempt it became harder and harder to get a usable gap. My strong suggestion is that a future revision uses small grub screws instead. I managed in the end but ended up taping the wires to minimise the risk of pulling them back out again.”
“I was surprised by quality of this little kit... Everything written by others stands here. Now, there's some tidbits that are bothering me - first of all, that connectors for speakers are fiddly, they are so soft that they might break if you push it hard, but once you manage to connect them it's rock solid.
Software (it's not pimoronis fault), they really did their best with libraries & all, but mopidy is just not something I thought I would have so much problems with - from setup to managing anything not spotify to work... Few years back they had tonnes of plugins, now more & more don't work, or are abandoned. I'm still searching for an alternative, and volumio tends to be one of the best with support for pirate audio boards, although lot of plugins is subscription only.
To reiterate, pimoronis hardware and pimoronis libraries are top of the class, five stars. Other software is just sub par...”
“Great little project. Looks great, works great. Only thing I found difficult are speaker connectors, which are fiddly, and wear off quite fast. And software, though not pimoronis fault, instead of getting new options it loses them, and i ended up switching to another software. I'll add pictures later, too lazy to do it now ;)”
“Stereo output with a colour screen and 4 buttons on the gpio...? All the size of a pi zero.....? For under £20...? I felt like a pirate cause this is a steel.”
“Great for Touch Panel control of a Portable Internet Radio.
The display is crisp and the sound quality excellent. Like the functionality of the four buttons placed around the tiny screen. I found it was easy to convert it to behave like mini Touch Screen.
I put a small acrylic cover over the display loosely held in position by a frame so that the buttons can be operated by pressing the corners of the acrylic. This gives the function of touch screen display. By multiplexing the the output of the switches you can get no less than 9 different functions from the touch panel, press centre - all four switches close , top bottom and sides - operate pairs of switches and, of course, each corner operating the switches individually.
It is a great basis for my portable internet radio running off rechargeable batteries.”
“The first impression is the looks and the Pirate Audio does not disappoint: The black/gold/white color combination looks very nice, the screen is small but the image quality is great. I had a bit of trouble getting the speaker wires into the connectors but that may just be my terrible hand-eye-coordination. Getting it running is easy with the official instructions and it works just fine for me.”
