Mastodawn

Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/firewire-on-a-raspberry-pi/

Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi

After learning Apple killed off FireWire (IEEE 1394) support in macOS 26 Tahoe, I started looking at alternatives for old FireWire equipment like hard drives, DV cameras, and A/V gear. I own an old Canon GL1 camera, with a 'DV' port. I could plug that into an old Mac (like the dual G4 MDD above) with FireWire—or even a modern Mac running macOS < 26, with some dongles—and transfer digital video footage between the camera and an application like Final Cut Pro.

Jeff Geerling

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MomsAVoxell 1d ago

This is an awesome project.

I have a long-in-the-tooth investment in Fireware audio devices (Presonus) in my studio - 19” rack interfaces with 10 I/O’s, as well as the StudioMix mixer with 20 or so .. I’ve been keeping an aging iMac around to use all of this with and it still just plain works, but having the option to replace it with an rPi is really appealing. The system is mostly used for tracking, so having REAPER on the rPi, connected to all that FireWire gear, just seems such a nice idea…

I wonder what the load will be like, though? Can the latest rPi with PCI hat and Firwire interface handle 40 channels of audio over FireWire, I wonder? I know the issue would mostly be SD-card write speeds and so on .. maybe this disqualifies the rPi - but certainly there are other ARM-based SBC’s that this same technique could be applied to ..

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joerick

I have a Focusrite Saffire that has lots of nice, quiet preamps and ADC channels. I managed to get an old Mac to connect over FireWire and using the Focusrite Control app, I configured the routing to map all the analog inputs to ADAT. That works great but it's always at the wrong sample rate, and I can't change that without getting the old Mac out. Maybe I'll look into one of these rPi shields too. Anyone got any reverse engineering tips for the control protocol?!