Hi! Does anyone know if it’s possible to solder or attach the Pi-top speaker directly to a raspberry pi 3A+, so that it can work as a USB/ALSA speaker?
It’s not possible to modify the speaker V1, but it would be possible to solder the speaker V2 to the raspberry Pi, though I don’t guarantee success here!
For the Speaker V1, you would need to make sure that you have the I2C ports soldered (GPIO 2 & 3) and then the I2S ports as well (16,18, 19, 20, & 21).
If you’re not sure how to see those pins from the speaker pinout, then you can refer to this knowledgebase article here. Just remember that the speaker male pins will be a mirror image of this pinout, but the female socket will be identical.
(Here’s the pinout from the article)
One last thing. If you’re not running pi-top OS, then you’ll need to install the pi-top drivers. You can find the instructions on this Knowledge Base Article
Thanks! So there is no way to use the Pi-top speaker with Retropie then? Or has anyone got it to work?
Well, the V1 speaker is an HDMI audio device. Your operating system should allow you to select it. The V2 speaker is an I2C device. In either case you need to install the Pi-Top drivers because I assume that RetroPie doesn’t come with them.
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