Getting the PiFi HAT working

I bought a PiFi HAT from aliexpress & today I attempted to get it up & running. I spent a lot of time getting it working & made a couple of observations in the process.
I worked with the latest build which I downloaded and installed as of today.

Steps I followed. ( collected from different sources & after many iterations )

  1. “My OSMC > Pi Config >Hardware support > Enable LIRC GPIO set to Disabled & set Soundcard overlay to hifiberry-dac-overlay
  2. Settings > System > Audio > Audio Output Device > ALSA: Default (snd_rpi_hihiberry_dacplus Analog)
  3. Edited the 3 files with the respective lines.
    sudo nano /etc/modules
    bcm2708_dmaengine
    snd_soc_pcm512x
    snd_soc_hifiberry_dacplus
    snd_soc_bcm2708_i2s

sudo nano /boot/config.txt
dtoverlay=hifiberry-dacplus

sudo nano /etc/asound.conf
pcm.!default {
type hw card 0
}
ctl.!default {
type hw card 0
}

Observation 1
After editing /boot/config.txt & rebooting, the “My OSMC > Pi Config” menu stops working.
Tried many things like updating from the GUI as well as apt-get update & apt-get upgrade to get it working but it just won’t work.
I did go through the thread link where it is supposed to be closed, but this does not work after /boot/config.txt is edited as mentioned above
Un-doing the changes get it working back again.

Observation 2
After apt-get upgrade command is executed the PiFi device stops working ( no audio output )
Not sure what breaks it. Troubleshooting this is currently beyond my skillset.
The only way I could fix it is to reload the entire OSMC SD card.

My Questions.

  1. Does anybody know what feature would be broken by disabling the LIRC ?
    I do intend to use the IR receiver on the PiFi HAT in the near future.
  2. What is the difference when doing an update from ssh (apt-get update) & from the GUI ? is there a way to trigger the GUI update from SSH ?

You should always be using dist-upgrade as opposed to upgrade alone.