Its time to power up the Pi and its touch screen. It is necessary to apply two sources of power, one for the screen and one for the Pi. I bought a suitable cable from SmartiCase at the same time as the case itself.

Place the two micro-USB plugs carefully in to the sockets – its a bit fiddly – and trail the cable away from the back of the device.

Now to power up!

Oh dear. I forgot to wipe the SD card from the last time I used the Pi, helping to test a friend’s arcade machine build. Now here’s where things get fiddly. It will be necessary to undo the screws on the audio hat in order to allow its extraction before the trap-door can be opened and the Pi flipped out to allow the SD card to be extracted and replaced. Give me a moment to burn a new image on the card…
While I’m preparing a new Raspian image, let’s have a look at Hector having fun checking the case for Lego compatibility…


OK, the SD card is now loaded with Raspbian. Lets see how it looks…

It works beautifully. I plugged in a USB souncard into the hub that is powering everything and used it to hook up to one of my radio receivers. (Note, the Pi-DAC is for high quality audio output only. There is no line in). Forty metres was quite lively so I installed FLDIGI and tuned to the PSK section of the band…

It works beautifully. There is no jerkiness or lag on the waterfall display. I had to tweak the microphone level a bit to prevent it overloading. Finally I tried a screen capture on the Pi.
