The Desk of Ladyada - You need to calm down!
96This week at my Desk we put together our Rev A of the "Baby Einstein Take Along Tunes" toy hacker PCB. Unlike the Teddy Ruxpin hacking which just requires encoding data in the right format, we've been designing a full replacement circuit board since the original had an epoxy PROM that was not user accessible. Now that we have it in hand, we were able to bring up the board with CircuitPython and wrote some code to get a quick demo going. The S2 module, micro SD slot, WiFi, NeoPixels and I2S amplifier work just fine - now we can play any audio file we like such as Taylor Swift (https://twitter.com/adafruit/status/1672038766305763329) or NIN. We did have some issues with the power supply, not surprising because we made a few assumptions that turned out wrong. We also started trying to develop with WiFi workflow, which is good because we're finding all sorts of bugs and new feature requests.
The Great Search - 3.3V Buck-Boost Converter
https://www.digikey.com/short/jhdzw3r5
These are power supplies that are 'ambidextrous' - they can convert lower or higher voltages to one steady output. A good idea for if, say, you have something that could be powered by USB or two AA's but you want 3.3V output. Much like the name implies, they can both 'buck' the voltage down, and 'boost' the voltage up. For our Toy Hacker board, lets try to find a low cost buck-boost chip that will give us about 500mA of 3.3V output even from two nearly-dead AA batteries that are 0.9V. We want something somewhat small and fairly inexpensive, efficiency isn't the most important since we expect folks to use rechargeable AAs anyhow.
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#adafruit #calmdown #deskofladyada