What audio interfaces can I connect to a Raspberry Pi (3B) running Elk?

General Elk Discussion
1

Hi there, sorry very new to Elk but here it goes.

What audio interfaces can I connect to a Raspberry Pi (3B) running Elk i? If I understand the docs correctly (which I probably am not) I can only use one of the development boards if I want an audio interface? For example I what to connect my Focusrite 18i8 to my Raspberry Pi (3B), is this possible?

Thank you!

2

Hi BassBiscuit and welcome to the forums. The only audio “interfaces” that we support are our own ElkPi and the HifiBerry line of audio hats. There are a few other audio hats that use the same codec as the HifiBerry that probably will work, but we don’t officially support them. They’re basically knockoff of the HifiBerry design. See this thread for more details. Raspberry pi with builtin audio

USB audio interfaces will not work with ELK, basically the ultra low latency of ELK requires a much closer integration with the audio codec than what is possible using a USB connection.

Regards
Gustav

3

Hi Gustav, thank you for the welcome and clarifying that for me, makes sense now.

Cheers!

1 Like
4

Hi @Gustav,

I had a question related to this - has Elk determined whether or not Elk Audio OS runs correctly on the Raspberry Pi Computer Module 4 with the IO Board? Buy a Compute Module 4 IO Board – Raspberry Pi

I ask because it seems that it would be possible to attach either the ElkPi or HifiBerry hats exactly the same way to the GPIO, and could offer a development stepping stone to other form factors :slight_smile:

5

No, we haven’t tested the IO Board for the compute module ourselves. Though I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work. With the IO Board it should behave just like a regular Pi4 with access to the same io devices. From what I can tell, the only difference to the regular Pi4 is the added PCIe slot, which we are not using for ELK.