Finally get to tinker again.

I didn't realize its been nine months since I have posted. I should be able to post more frequently now that I have moved assembly of the audio boards closer to the customer. This means I have more time to work on other projects that I have going on.

This weeks post really didn't take much to get working. We are having a play date with some of my daughters friends and figured it would be good to have some music playing in the background. Normally I would just plug my phone into my amp and be done with it, but how boring is that.

I picked up a Bluetooth audio receiver for something else I was working on and figured it would work perfectly for this.

The Arduino is really there just to provide the 3.3V power to the receiver (little red board). The receiver was already setup to do audio instead of data so there's not a whole lot to it in general. Took about five minutes to put the whole thing together.

Stay tuned, I have a really neat new project coming up that will enable me to build my ultimate stereo.

Finally getting into production

Its been a while, not a whole lot has happened on the projects side.  Been working on refining these audio MP3 boards.

Will be sending the second and third boards out from the second prototype set Monday. The customers made some changes for this second run of boards and everything seemed to work. There one small thing that I still need to work on but for the most part they are ready for larger batch production.

Here are the last two prototypes.

On the home audio front, I am working on a really cool open source hardware project. I have most of the paper design done, working on schematic and layout now. Hope to have something presentable in a month or two.

Production work....

Ok well seven boards might not be full on production but for me its the largest (in pieces) order that I have had so far. Everything passed the smoke test but I still need to make sure functionally they work.

I shipped out the large MP3 board to the customer last week. Waiting to hear back to see if they like it etc. Hopefully I will hear something soon.

Touchy Touchy

Once I got the audio portion figured out I needed to make sure that communication to the LCD worked. Well it works....kind of. I had to solder on a jumper wire for my board to receive data from the screen.

I can now detect that the screen was touched but need to work on the code to actually get positional data. After that I'll be working on the UI layout for the client.

After this project is done I think I might build be an integrated amp using this touchscreen and the amp. Should be fun!

Version Two Works!!!!!

It has been a really busy last few months. The wife and I bought a house and we had a baby. It took me a couple months but I redid the MP3 board and ended up creating a large amplifier shield. I finally had a chance to work on the code and the track selection buttons work as they should. I need to fine tune some timing issues but the bulk of the work is done. 

By still having a regular Arduino on there it gives me the option to add shields for later. Now to ship it off to the customers and see what they think.

 

MP3 Board Testing

I got one board assembled and working on testing it. The mic portion works as it did on the mic boards and the amp works well. I had to get out my 12V 6A power supply to test it. I think I will lower the gain on the mic stage, a little bit of hiss gets through.

I tried the MP3 portion and I am not getting any audio. I am working on trouble shooting that now. It seems the Arduino is working as it should. So next to check is the memory card and then the MP3 ic.

There are some modifications that I need to make to the board but nothing major.

Boards have come in!!

Its a month to the day since I last posted. Since then I have started the process on purchasing a house and found out that I have a little girl coming in November.

I ordered the boards and it seems they took a little longer than normal for what ever reason.  I can't complain though the price is right. This weekend I will building one of the boards up section by section. If these audio amps turn out to sound ok I might have to make a little integrated amp for kicks. I already see some changes that I want to make to the board but that will have to wait till the next run.

The smaller boards are just more mic mixer boards. 

They look good, crossing my fingers that they work.