Arduino Radio/Intercom/Wireless Audio:

Streaming Audio in Real Time using Arduino and NRF24L01

  In my last blog post, I talked about using inexpensive radio modules to transmit audio at reasonable rates using only the radio modules, a microphone or input device, and an Arduino. This started out as what I thought would be a simple project, and ended up being a WAY bigger project than I thought, since it required improving the speed of the extremely well written RF24 library for the radio modules. Although there wasn't a lot of room for improvement, from my (biased) testing, some cases show performance increases up to 25% in some situations over the fastest fork I could identify.

  I think this streaming audio code would be good in library form, but for now, the sketches I am using to develop the library are posted on GitHub Here the whole sketch folder is required. The audio is only 8-bit right now, but even that is not bad. Judging by the transfer speeds, I should be able to do 10-bit audio, but the code in 8bit was just simpler to start with. To put the quality in perspective, telephone quality could be about 8khz, 12bit, 96bps data rate, while CD quality could be said to be 44.1khz, 16bit,706k Data rate. This sketch currently does 8 to 44khz+ at 8-bit, with the possibility to go to 10-bit. Depending on the sample rate and bit rate, the user can adjust the quality according to the application.

  The sketch is simple to configure for testing, just edit the user variables defined at the top of the sketch and upload. It can then be controlled by sending 'r' to start recording/sending and 's' to stop, and '=','-' to raise or lower the volume when receiving. External buttons can also be defined in the user config section to allow users to create things like intercoms or even a portable radio or wireless headset. The audio at 10-bit will not be super high quality, but should be very reasonable for voice transmission.

Recording is simply done from an analog pin, and should work with microphones etc designed for Arduino. It currently uses the 5v voltage reference for recording.

  This sketch could be easily converted to use any transmission medium that can support the streaming data at a consistent sample rate, and the library could support multiple radio devices and more advanced hardware, but that would definitely take some time. If it does end up as a library, it will of course be published on GitHub for anyone to use or modify.

The library may work ok with the standard RF24 library or current forks, but my fork has been designed specifically for these purposes, so don't forget to install it if using the data rate/sample rate combinations shown in the example. Download Lib

Update:

10-bit Audio: I comtemplated a few different ways to include the extra two bits in the transmission, and ended up putting the main 8bits of each sample in the first 25 bytes of the payload. The remaining bit-pairs are then placed into bytes 26 to 31. This seemed like the easiest way to 'encode' and thus 'decode' the data, but it does put a bit of an extra load on the MCU. The max sample rate for 10-bit audio is about 24khz, but with 32khz it will just be 9-bit.

Multicasting: The only changes required to include multicasting involved setting all the radios to listen on the same pipe by default, and setting all radios to transmit on the same pipe when transmitting. Since only one radio should be transmitting at a time, it is pretty straightforward. This also removes the need to configure radios differently. If using the same Arduino board, all the radios can be configured exactly the same unless using remote commands, which would require some code changes.


Update 2:

See https://github.com/nRF24/RF24Audio for more info. The library can be installed using the Arduino library manager.