Let's Shake The Room!

Here you will find quick tutorials and snipits to get you started with the picoAUDIO.

wave

Plug It In!


Your picoAUDIO board has been specially designed to work with the TinyPICO ESP32 development board. The convenient headers provide an easy way to connect your boards together without the hassle of jumper wires.

There is nothing stopping you from using any microcontroller with the picoAUDIO board, though you will need to consult the pinout reference and connect them manually.

Warning! Do not plug other microcontrollers directly in to the picoAUDIO socket as this may damage either device.

 

Handling


When handling the picoAUDIO board, try to avoid unnecessary contact with the jumper pins. Contacting these pins while the board is operating will introduce noise and possibly short circuits forcing the audio amplifiers to perform a protective shutdown. If enough static electricity is discharged it is possible to damage your audio board IC’s.

Plastic shrouds and a 3D printed base have been provided to help avoid unwanted contact with the audio gain jumpers.

When attaching the base to the board, use 2.5mm / M2.5 screws, with a preference to using nylon screws to avoid unwanted shorts to nearby components. Ensure you do not overtighten your screws as this may result in crushing the board and damaging the external or internal layers.

Warning! If you attempt to clean your board, please pay special attention to the microphone port. The installed MEMS microphone does not like to get wet and will be damaged by direct application of water or alcohol.

 

Preparation


Before compiling the picoAUDIO example applications, a few simple preparations are required.

First we need to install some open source support libraries for LCD and TFT screens. Even if you don’t intend on using a screen with your picoAUDIO device, you will need to download these libraries to compile the MP3 SDCard and MP3 Net Radio samples.

Library URL Used In Samples
PicoAudio https://github.com/AdamKeher/Pico-Audio-Arduino Most
TinyPICO-Helper https://github.com/tinypico/tinypico-arduino MP3_NetRadio, Sound_Recorder, Vocoder
LiquidCrystal_I2C https://github.com/johnrickman/LiquidCrystal_I2C MP3_NetRadio, MP3_SDCard
TFT_eSPI https://github.com/Bodmer/TFT_eSPI MP3_NetRadio

Info: If you are not familiar with installing libraries from github there is a great tutorial over at the Bald Engineer

Info: The picoAUDIO board is built using standard I2S and I2C components. Users are not required to use the PicoAudio library to utilise the board. The library is provided as a helper library to get you started. Refer to the specifications section for details on the IC’s used to build this board and ESP32 developers manual for more information.
 

Make Some Noise


Now that we have installed the required supporting library files for the picoAUDIo board, we can move on to the more interesting task of making NOISE!.

Info: The MP3 SD Card example automatically plays all MP3's files from a folder named 'MP3' in the root of your SD Card.
 

LCD Display


Let's keep the momentum going and connect a 16x02 I2C LCD to our picoAUDIO running the MP3 SD Card example.

 

Specifications


IC Manufactuer Purpose Datasheet
UDA1334ATS NXP I2S DAC UDA1334ATS.pdf
MAX98306 Maxim Analog Stereo Amplifier MAX98306.pdf
TPA6132A2 Texas Instruments Analog Headphone Amplifier TPA6132A2.pdf
SPH0645LM4H Knowles I2S Microphone SPH0645LM4H.pdf
PCF8574RGTR Texas Instruments I2C GPIO Expander PCF8574.pdf
 

Pinout


 

Audio Samples


The following audio files have been recorded from the picoAUDIO’s headphone jack using a Native Instruments DAC connected to a PC. The files have not been processed in any way other than to trim the start and end of the files. They are indicative of the audio quality achieved by the board.

Recording Audio Chain

MP3 File picoAUDIO
DAC
picoAUDIO
Headphone Amp
PC DAC
(+8dB)
WAV File

Stereo Channel Test

A simple test of stereo seperation.

Audio Sweep

A full sweep across the audio spectrum showing the picoAUDIO's range and fidelity.

Music Test

A recording of Deadmau5 / Where's The Drop? / Strobe (ov) from a MP3 file played via the SDCard slot.