Adding quality audio to an electronic project is surprisingly difficult. People tend to end up either using low-quality ISD chips (you might get 8Khz sampling rate for 30seconds out of these, if you're lucky!) or mucking around with trying to control a CD or MP3 player. Although it's possible to generate audio direct from a microcontroller using a PWM output, the quality is often low and it's hard to fit a lot of music in an EEPROM chip. You can buy an embedded MP3 player board, but they're either expensive or difficult to use!
Adding quality audio to an electronic project is surprisingly difficult. Here is a shield for Arduinos that solves this problem.
- It can play up to 22KHz, 12bit uncompressed audio files of any length. It's low cost, available as an easy-to-make kit.
- It has an onboard DAC, filter and op-amp for high quality output.
- Audio files are read off of an SD/MMC card, which are available at nearly any store. Volume can be controlled with the onboard thumbwheel potentiometer.
- This shield is a kit, and comes with all parts you need to build it.
- Arduino, SD card, tools, speaker and headphones are not included.
Additional information:
• Dimensions (assembled): 69mm x 65mm x 13mm (2.7in x 2.5in x 0.5in)
• The shield comes with an Arduino library for easy use; simply drag uncompressed wave files onto the SD card and plug it in. Then use the library to play audio when buttons are pressed, or when a sensor goes off, or when serial data is received, etc. Audio is played asynchronously as an interrupt, so the Arduino can perform tasks while the audio is playing.
• Can play any uncompressed 22KHz, 16bit, mono Wave (.wav) files of any size. While it isn't CD quality, it is certainly good enough to play music, have spoken word, or audio effects. Check out the demo video/audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYKLJoUwGKo
• Output is mono, into L and R channels, standard 3.5mm headphone jack and a connection for a speaker that is switched on when the headphones are unplugged
• Files are read off of a FAT16/FAT32-formatted SD/MMC card
• Included library and examples makes playing audio easy
• Please note that the library is rather bulky, requiring 10K of flash and more than 1/2 K of RAM for buffering audio. It works fine using an yATmega328-based Arduino (Duemilanove, Uno or compatible).
• This shield is not Mega or Leonardo compatible!