Audio Shield for Arduino

Link: Audio Shield for Arduino.

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 its 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!

Here is a shield for Arduino that solves many of these problems. 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.

Boarduinoなどを開発＆販売しているLimorさんの新作、Audio Shieldが発表＆発売されました。例によってとりあえず注文しましたが、これは興味深いプロジェクトです。紹介文の中でも簡潔にまとめられているように、オーディオ再生をマイコンなどで扱うというのは結構大変な作業です。かといって簡易にできる方法を採用するとさまざまな制限やクオリティが…という問題があったのですが、再生に関してはこのアプローチはかなり有効だと思います。手元に届いたらまた詳しくレポートを書こうと思います。