Picroft - Raspberry Pi 4b - no audio input or output

I first tested Mycroft out on a Raspbery Pi2b - PS3 EYE, and a cheap 3.5mm speaker. I knew it wasn’t recommended but I just wanted to try it. I liked Mycroft after testing, so I bought the following gear to run Mycroft:

  • Raspbery Pi 4b
  • 5.1v 3amp 15.8watt power supply
  • Blue Snowball ICE microphone
  • Creative 3.5mm Pebble speakers
  • 32gb Samsung EVO U1 MicroSD card

I can load Picroft fine from the stable image.
I can run the setup wizard and successfully pass both the recording and playback tests.
Once Mycroft launches, Microphone and Speakers no longer work.
In the Mycroft CLI window, the mic level doesn’t register anything.
I can type commands in the mycroft cli terminal and everything operates as it should, just without any working mic input or speaker output.

I have played with alsamixer, pacmd, mycroft-config, I cannot figure out what’s going on. And I bought the recommended hardware.

So, I’m really lost at this point.

mycroft-speak does not work, but arecord and aplay both work fine.

If anyone has any ideas I would love some help. I’m putting a fresh load back on again to start over.

Thanks

Does unplugging and plugging the usb mic get it picked up under CLI?

I have this working now, but I’m not completely sure why.

I reloaded the SD card from image to have a fresh starting point. And then I came across this thread:

Where towards the bottom Bucketman said he simply restarted the services and things started working, and things are now working. So there must be something going on with the way services load on first boot after applying the image. Simply rebooting after a fresh load will not fix it, you have to restart all services from CLI. The only other thing I did this time related to sound input/output was tweak levels in alsamixer, but that was done after things started working. Alsa is using PulseAudio for both input/output in case that is useful info.

It seems stable for the time being, I can even reboot now that the above has been done.

I will report back if anything unexpected happens.

This is one thing I had tried, it didn’t seem to make any change in behavior.

Happy to hear you figured it out.