This project is EOL and intended to be replaced by a Pulse Audio version. See: https://github.com/pimoroni/pivumeter-pulseaudio

Pi VU Meter

ALSA Plugin to display a VU meter on various Raspberry Pi add-ons

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

In accordance with this license, we have chosen to publish Pi VU Meter under GPL version 3.0.

Pi VU Meter is Derived from the SDL display version of the ameter ALSA level meter plugin.

Installing

Currently, you will need to compile the pivumeter lib from source.

You may use our automated setup to do so, specifying the output device the wish to use (see options below):

setup.sh blinkt

if you’d rather compile and set things up yourself, read on!

pre-requisite

sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool libasound2-dev libfftw3-dev wiringpi

clone repository

if you haven’t done so already, git clone this repository and cd into it:

git clone https://github.com/pimoroni/pivumeter
cd pivumeter

compiling from source

from the top of the repository, run the following to generate the MakeFile:

aclocal && libtoolize
autoconf && automake --add-missing

then, to compile and install:

./configure && make
sudo make install

Options

Pi VU Meter supports various options in your /etc/asound.conf, these include:

output_device

Specify which device to display the VU meter on.

Supported devices:

blinkt - Simple amplitude meter through Green->Yellow->Red
phat-beat - Simple stereo amplitude meter
speaker-phat - Simple mono amplitude meter
scroll-phat - displays 11-band FFT-based EQ
scroll-phat-hd - displays 17-band FFT-based EQ

brightness

Specify the pixel brightness from 0 to 255

bar_reverse

Mirror the bar direction.

Example

pcm_scope.pivumeter {
        type pivumeter
        decay_ms 500
        peak_ms 400
        brightness 128
        bar_reverse 0
        output_device blinkt
}

a full example of a suitable asound.conf file can be found in the dependencies directory.