AutoAnalogAudio Arduino library updated with ESP32 Support

 AutoAnalogAudio Arduino library updated with ESP32 Support

ESP32 DAC/ADC Output/Input via the I2S peripheral

Previously this year, I received some ESP32 based MCUs with OLED displays from DigitSpace, and used these devices to add ESP32 support to the AutoAnalogAudio library. It is a bit different from previous iterations, since instead of AVR interrupts and PWM, the ESP32 uses much more advanced peripherals. The I2S capabilities of the ESP32 provide a fairly seamless interaction when in/outputting audio signals, since it is just a matter of configuring the I2S, DAC and/or ADC and feeding and/or drawing data from the device. The main challenge in this case was combining the I2S functionality with RTOS tasks to provide a simple, asynchronous audio interface as is the case with the AutoAnalogAudio library.

The capabilities are much the same, but the ESP32 portion is still a bit in development, although working nicely at this point. The ESP32 example is specifically for the ESP32 device, since some minor API changes were required to manage RTOS tasks in combination with the I2S peripheral. This allows asynchronous handling of audio, so users can start playback and manage other tasks however desired while audio playback occurs.

Hardware:

1 x ESP32 OLED Wifi Kit
1 x MAX9815 Microphone Preamp
1 x TDA7297 PA Module

The MAX9815 will provide some audio to sample, and the TDA7297 was used to amplify the output of the onboard DAC. The above hardware as mentioned is provided by DigitSpace.

Connecting the Hardware:

With the ESP32, the AAAudio library samples the ADC on analog channel 4 by default, and sound output is on DAC1 and/or DAC2 (See previous post for pinout) The ADC channel cannot currently be changed, but that is on the to-do list.

Limitations:

The ESP32 onboard ADC will provide relatively good quality audio sampling, at 12-bits. The onboard DAC however, is only 8-bits, so the output will not be quite as high quality as with the Arduino Due. Using a higher sample rate can make up a for the low bit-rate of the DAC, as higher sample-rate * bit-rate = quality.

Overview:

Updating the library for ESP32 support has been fairly interesting, as it required a fair bit of learning and development time to understand I2S and how to control the related peripherals, while providing the same or similar behavior as with currently supported devices like the Due or Uno.

All in all it seems to perform pretty well. Audio input or output from virtually any source can be managed via the AAAudio library.

The updated library has been released and should be available via the Arduino Library Manager.

Source Code: https://github.com/TMRh20/AutoAnalogAudio
Documentation: http://tmrh20.github.io/AutoAnalogAudio

ESP32 - Playing around with the I2S peripheral and DAC audio output

 ESP32 Arduino - Playing around with the I2S peripheral, ADC and DAC audio output

 In some of my last posts, I mentioned the ESP32 based boards I recently received from DigitSpace, and I finally found some time to play around with some of the audio based peripherals. In this case I'm starting small, attempting to create a simple sine wave output using the internal DAC.

The documentation for the I2S peripheral is a bit limited it seems, but there is enough information in the Arduino Github repo to make sense of things and get some basic audio output going.

The general theory seems to be pretty simple compared to working with previous libraries, TMRpcm and AutoAnalogAudio, which utilize timer driven interrupts and nested interrupts (AVR devices) to handle asynchronous audio processing. The ESP32 provides a number of methods to handle audio processing, with peripherals designed to offload this work from the central processor, making the user interface mostly about buffering and handling audio data.

I've put together a simple outline of the code on GitHub.

The above code will produce a simple sine wave output on the DAC pins (see previous ESP32 related posts for pinout) and can be toggled off/on by entering a '1' on the Arduino Serial monitor. An audio file can also be defined and played by entering a '2' in the Serial monitor. In this case the sketch is setup for a 32Khz, 16-bit, Mono audio file.

In this case the hardest part is following the documentation found above and figuring out just how simple it actually is to handle the I2S peripheral. Really, you just configure the appropriate sample rate and output pins, mode etc, and then feed data into the peripheral. If doing any digital signal processing, its really about providing enough CPU time to handle the data and feed it into I2S. If handling audio files, the hardest part is decoding.

This should prove to be a good basis for the AutoAnalogAudio library since the only thing left to do is add ADC support and either use timers or RTOS tasks to handle asynchronous processing of the audio.