Waveshield: Some thoughts

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thegrendel
 
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Joined: Sat May 28, 2011 2:42 pm

Waveshield: Some thoughts

Post by thegrendel »

I finished building the waveshield a few days ago. This is a sort
of report/review on it.


I didn't solder the ICs to the PCB. Used sockets. Note to
Adafruit: Consider including IC sockets with the kit, even if
you have to charge a buck or two extra for it.

I didn't hardwire/solder the SD card control lines to the Arduino
pins, as per the instructions. I installed female headers and
wired from header to header. More flexibility, huh?

Well, the shield pretty much works as specified, with a little
diddling. The output jack is, I guess, a stereo jack, but it will
work with a mono plug if you play around with it. There's enough on-board amplification to drive a small 8-ohm speaker at low volume, but a headphone is better.

I'm using a 1 Gb SD card. It mostly works okay, but some of the SD library examples don't like it. And I had to manually
edit the SD.h file to get the examples to compile.

I just installed the WaveHC library. The "daphc" sketch does
indeed play all the wav files in the root directory of the card,
but not necessarily in the order I intended. The FAT fs doesn't sort filenames the same way as Linux ext3, I guess.
Sound quality is acceptable, but nowhere near hifi, but that's
a function more of the recorded quality of the files than the shield.

Note that some wav files will not play, especially the ones
with mp3 compression.

Overall, I'm happy with the shield. What I'm really hoping is
that it's hackable enough to use for data logging and program/data storage, rather than just playing sound files.
Thanks, Adafruit, for doing a quality job on this one.

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