Re: Any recommendations for audio player microcontrollers?

Hi Don,

Thanks for your inputs. The device that I'm building is a small portable
device (wrist-watch, belt, whatever) that gives out sound effects (each 1~5
seconds, and a total of 8~256 clips) on user command. For sound quality, I
might need it to be better than telephone because many sound effects will
lose its thrill if they are too distorted.

200ms delay between command and playing will be unacceptable, that's why
I was worried about the overhead time to read from file systems on SD cards.

Do you have any good cheap microcontroller (I don't need a lot of
features) that's small, low power, and have fast access to like 4M memory?

Thanks.

Cheers,
Hoi


"Don McKenzie" <5V@xxxx> wrote in message
news:6aci86F37d19sU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Frank Buss wrote:
Hoi Wong wrote:

I'm trying to build a small device that instantly plays one of many
short audio clips stored in memory on user's command.

Does anybody know any easy to program microcontroller that integrates
all the needs below?

This depends on how many seconds at which bit resolution you want to
store.

1. GPIO (8 pins will be enough)
2. Built in memory (external is OK as long as it's easy to hook up)
3. Directly drives small loudspeakers (0.5W).

The audio quality doesn't have to be good. 22kHz audio will be more than
enough.

A cheaper solution than the VLSI chip could be to use a standard low-cost
microcontroller with sufficient flash. Most microcontrollers have a PWM
output. Add an external FET and lowpass filter for some cents, and you
can
drive a loudspeaker with it.

The only drawback is that flash in microcontrollers is expensive. If you
use something like 16k flash, the sound memory would be less than a
second,
if uncompressed. Would be interesting to see, if it is possible to
implement e.g. a decoder for the free Ogg Vorbis format (MP3 requires
license fee for each device, or a really big one-time fee) in a small and
slow microcontroller.

Another idea: just buy a 500k serial flash for less than $1 (in higher
quantities), which can store more than 20 seconds uncompressed 8 bit
audio
data.

http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail?name=W25X40VSSIG-ND

if you really have a lot of audio clips, then this may work for you:
http://www.dontronics-shop.com/4d-uDRIVE-uSD-G1-Tiny-Disk-Drive-Data-Storage-Module-p-16692.html

Don...


--
Don McKenzie

Site Map: http://www.dontronics.com/sitemap
E-Mail Contact Page: http://www.dontronics.com/email

Intelligent 2.83" AMOLED with touch screen for micros:
http://www.dontronics-shop.com/product.php?productid=16699


.

Relevant Pages

  • Burning audio cd with burncd command
    ... I read the freebsd handbook on mp3 and making ... I still get the pop click sound when I play the audio cd. ... Is there a switch missing in the command syntax ...
    (freebsd-questions)
  • audio problems in fc 6
    ... I don't get any beep sound and there were no errors even. ... I was told to try above command to ... find whether my audio worked properly or not. ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: Combining sound files
    ... sox is a command line program that you can experiment with on the ... SoX - Sound eXchange - The Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation ...
    (php.general)
  • Re: is there a problem on this simple code
    ... > the hardware is a school project that uses a microcontroller for ... > do a command ... If the checksum is ...
    (comp.lang.python)
  • Re: Any recommendations for audio player microcontrollers?
    ... Does anybody know any easy to program microcontroller that integrates all ... Built in memory ... The audio quality doesn't have to be good. ... The only drawback is that flash in microcontrollers is expensive. ...
    (comp.arch.embedded)