Wave Shield Kit v1.1

Manufacturer

Adafruit Industries, USA.

Hackability Level

high, the perfect hackable device, you can do what you want with it

Adding quality audio to an electronic project is surprisingly difficult. Although it's possible to generate audio direct from a microcontroller using a PWM output, the quality is often low and its hard to fit a lot of music in an EEPROM chip. You can buy an embedded MP3 player board, but they're either expensive or difficult to use!

Here is a shield for Arduino that solves many of these problems. It can play up to 22KHz, 12bit uncompressed audio files (PCM/WAV only) of any length. It's low cost, available as an easy-to-make kit. It has an onboard DAC, filter and op-amp for high quality output. Audio files are read off of an SD/MMC card, which are available at nearly any store. Volume can be controlled with the onboard thumbwheel potentiometer.

• Can play any uncompressed 22KHz, 12bit, mono Wave (.wav) files of any size. While it isnt CD quality, it is certainly good enough to play music, have spoken word, or audio effects
• Output is mono, into L and R channels, standard 3.5mm headphone jack and a connection for a speaker that is switched on when the headphones are unplugged
• Files are read off of FAT16 formatted SD/MMC card
• Included library makes playing audio easy