Desk of Ladyada - AVR programmin', RP2040 featherin', and Cactus Tear-Downin'
66This week we continue on our Pico-ification of testers, we did a lot of RP2040 and ESP32-based boards. This week we revisited an older Circuit Playground Classic (https://www.adafruit.com/product/3000) tester that was originally built on an Arduino M0 Pro (https://docs.arduino.cc/retired/boards/arduino-m0-pro) - a neat dev board that is no longer manufactured. We converted this code to the RP2040 and it works great so we can get this board back in stock now that ATmega32u4s are shipping again. We also did low power checks on the eInk RP2040 Feather. Arduino support for the RP2040 doesn't yet have low power support (https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico/issues/345), but we have it in CircuitPython! So with all functionality tested, that board has been ordered. We also decided to do a teardown of a Cactus Mimic Toy, its always interesting to see how ultra-low-cost toys are designed and manufactured.
The Great Search - NuvoTon audio record & playback chips
https://www.digikey.com/short/pbjf0zrh
While doing a teardown of a toy cactus that mimics people (https://www.google.com/search?q=mimic+cactus) by recording & replaying the last few seconds of audio, we were reminded of ISD audio chips. These record-and-playback chips have been around for decades and are a favorite with makers and engineers who want to quickly add audio prompt playback without big processing capability. These chips don't require battery backup or a flash memory chip, they keep the audio clips stored internally in a compressed format. Originally these were popularized in use cases like "digital greeting cards" that you could record a message onto. Despite being quite old, they're still used a lot and are very simple and often available in large packages, so for many projects they're still the easiest way to do add simple sound effects or audio messages. Digi-Key has a wide range of ISD audio chips available for purchase, lets look at the large range and pick a good one to start with.
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