Raspberry Pi – Neewer HDMI To VGA Adapter Setup

The Neewer HDMI Input To VGA Adapter allows you to hook your Pi up a venerable VGA display via the HDMI port, this is handy if you have an old VGA only screen hanging around doing nothing.

It is very neat adaptor and I found that it works well with good video quality, but it requires a little bit of set-up to get it working with audio being output via the headphone jack.

It took me quite a while to figure out the settings to change in /boot/config.txt to get it to work (it was a a fairly random process… ;-) ), but in the end it was simple enough – here’s what worked for me:

In /boot/config.txt, set the value of hdmi_drive to 2, like this:
[code]
# uncomment to force a HDMI mode rather than DVI. This can make audio work in
# DMT (computer monitor) modes
hdmi_drive=2
[/code]
But how do you make these changes to config.txt if the screen isn’t working? well you have two options here:

1.) SSH into your pi (if it’s connected to your network), or

2.) Power it down and pop out the SD card, place the SD card into your laptop or whatever and edit the file there, put the SD card back into your Pi to test.

This should be enough to get the display working, now to get the sound to come out of the headphone socket I had to run the following commands from terminal:
[code]
sudo amixer cset numid=1 — 90%
sudo amixer cset numid=3 1
[/code]
The first sets the volume to 90% (it was at 0?). The second sets the headphone jack as the output port for sound, I test if the audio setting are working by running:
[code]
sudo aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav
[/code]
When you run this you should hear somebody muttering about something to do with front and centres!

I think that there are versions of these HDMI to VGA adaptors with sound built in, so if audio is important to you this adaptor may be a better buy than this one…