Wave Shield vs. MP3 Maker vs. Sound Board(regular/mini)

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eekster
 
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Wave Shield vs. MP3 Maker vs. Sound Board(regular/mini)

Post by eekster »

Hello Adafruit,

Love watching your shows, especially Show and Tell!
I wanted to know what's better for my 1:8 - 1:6 scale miniature jukebox project with all the sounds and light animations. I see that the Soundboard would be ideal as I've never had any experience with Arduino before (although I can probably do better on the programming side rather than the putting the electronics together aspect of things). I'm interested on taking Arduino some time soon so I was hyped to see I can do my jukebox project with the Wave Shield - it even says on the project suggestions! Then there's also the MP3 Maker Shield. I'm thinking the lights (whether Neopixels or Sequins) will be sound reactive.

What are the pros and cons on going with one and not the other? What do you recommend, cost-wise, epic-wise, complexity-wise? Any help would really be appreciated!

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Wave Shield vs. MP3 Maker vs. Sound Board(regular/mini)

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

The FX Board is easiest to use. All you have to do is pull a pin low and it will play the corresponding file. You only get 16MB worth of file storage though, and the files have to be in WAV format.

The Wave Shield lets you use an SD card, but the files still have to be in WAV format. The Arduino's microcontroller has to read information from the SD card and send that to the digital-to-analog converter, so it stays pretty busy. It takes some effort to play audio and run NeoPixels at the same time.

The Music Maker is a full decoder which can play MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, and OGG tracks. It also uses an SD card, so you can store and play about as much music as you want. It does need a microcontroller to read data from the SD card, but it's easier to swap between doing that and running LEDs like NeoPixels.

In all cases, it would probably be easier to use DotStar LED pixels instead of NeoPixels. NeoPixels use signal timing to indicate whether an incoming bit should be a 1 or a 0, where DotStars use a separate clock signal that says, "okay, you can read the bit now." That extra signal requires one more wire and one more microcontroller pin, but the flexibility in timing makes that a good trade when you have a microcontroller that's doing other time-critical things simultaneously.

If you're new to the Arduino, step back and work with the individual pieces one at a time before trying to put everything together. It's easier to make a series of small changes than to put a dozen things together and then try to figure out which three don't fit properly.

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eekster
 
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Re: Wave Shield vs. MP3 Maker vs. Sound Board(regular/mini)

Post by eekster »

Thanks for the quick response, Mike! I didn't even consider DotStars. DotStars are addressable individually, right?

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Re: Wave Shield vs. MP3 Maker vs. Sound Board(regular/mini)

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

Yep. They program pretty much like NeoPixels. They just transmit signals in a different way.

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