Phil’s Adventures with his Raspberry Pi: Part Three

Following part one of my story - http://it-is-phil-time.blogspot.com/2012/06/phils-adventures-with-his-raspberry-pi.html - and part two - http://it-is-phil-time.blogspot.com/2012/06/phils-adventures-with-his-raspberry-pi_04.html - it’s time to pick up the story.

Having failed to successfully connect my Raspberry Pi up to a standard VGA monitor, which is very disappointing, and then having purchased an adaptor that failed to work (thankfully Amazon have refunded me) I have dived into the deep end and purchased a cheap – but still £120 – monitor that accepts a HDMI input and – voila – I now have a monitor that accepts the signal of the Raspberry Pi and works in my parent’s music room. Problem overcome even at a financial cost of four times what I paid for the computer.

To bring everyone up to speed my plan is to replace my parent’s aging PC in the music room with this to play out music quickly and easily. Sadly at the moment it’s turning out to be neither. I am still waiting for the Pi case I ordered a few weeks ago which is now in the processing stage so hopefully should be here soon but I have come across an even bigger problem: I can’t get any sound of it.

I’ve tried playing both MP3s and WAVs through its inbuilt LX Music player, both from files on an external hard drive, USB stick and the SD card itself but all to no avail. I’m not getting any sound out of the HDMI – though I don’t think the monitor has speakers so that’s not surprising – but neither am I getting it out of the 3.5mm jack port into my stereo.

Now it’s a cheap computer and I’m no expert in this side of computing but it’s frustrating me that six weeks on its been nothing but a struggle to get images and sound out of the device, which is surely the very basics you’d expect from a computer. I fear that it’s just too problematic compared to the BBC Micro and Acorn computers I used as a youngster and I question whether it’s really the platform to be a good starting point for young people hoping to get into the world of computer programming. Or maybe I’m missing the point and all these struggles are actually a realistic recreation of the world of software development?

If anyone can point me in the right direction of where I’m going wrong regarding the lack of sound output I’d be very grateful. In the meantime I shall soldier on with trying to get it to work in a project that has turned from potential to frustrating disappointment...

Help please!