Material Choice for Portable Sound Player

Thanks for the comments to my post below. It seems like I wasn't clear about the needs for the project when I ask for suggestions on component choice. Instead of continuing the thread below, let me start fresh here.

I'm trying to build a portable, low power sound player that plays the selected sound clips from user command. Here are the specs:

- Low power

- Small (at the size of a wrist-watch)

- Have 8 GIPO (8-pin input)

- 8-bit audio

- 64~256 short audio clips (2~5 seconds each) at 11kHz

- I have a bunch of free AT49BV162* flash memory to play with

- I have used Atmel once, but if other options are easier to program, I'll still go with them.

- Needs to download the audio clips from USB

- Hopefully cheap (I don't need extra features)

Can anybody suggest a simple, easy to interface and program microcontroller for this project? I'm looking at Atmel's choices, but I'm not sure if I should go for the USB AVRs or ATtiny or Atmega. Ease of design is my first priority, then compactness and cost.

I'm especially concerned about how to interface the atmel controllers to AT49BV162* flash memory and how to load the data to it using USB. Should I use GPIO or there are direct memory mapping pins?

Thanks!

Reply to
Hoi Wong
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Winbond had some parts meeting your requirements exactly, even the USB.

Reply to
larwe

You would be better using atmels serial data flash in an 8 pin package.....

Reply to
TT_Man

Are you going to drive a speaker with this device. The speaker driver will take more power then the entire cpu, memory, audio output circuits.

How big are your wrists ?? ;-)

(back of napkin worst case calulations)

256 clips * 5 seconds * 11050 (8bit) samples = 14144000 bytes = 14 MBytes So a 16 Mbyte flash device would be required.

At the low end:

64 clips * 2 seconds * 11050 samples = 1414400 bytes = 1.4 Mbytes

Average:

128 clips * 2.5 seconds * 11050 samples = 3535000 bytes = 3.5 Mbytes

This chip has 21 address pins and 16 data pins and 6 control pins.

43 pins used to interface to your micro. I think a serial device would be better.

You will never get the size you want with this feature.

Too build or buy ?? Is a pcb layout an extra feature ??

Google "diy mp3" Almost every 8 bit micro has been turned into a diy mp3 player.

Lots of hits of what others have done in the past, some are available to purchase.

Lots of code out there as well.

Most mp3 decoder chips can play 8 bit samples.

USB will be the hardest part of this type of project.

There are two parts to USB. The PC side and the embedded side.

If this is your first project, be sure to have lots of time. Some here may be able to do this project within 3 months, you may not be so lucky.

Good luck, let us know how you get along.

donald

Reply to
donald

Which parts from Winbond would you recommend? Thanks.

Reply to
Hoi Wong

I do expect driving the loudspeaker to be the major power drain. At least I wanted the least power consumption when idle.

Very very big. Larger than Dave Letterman's hand :)

Thanks for reminding me about the wiring nightmare! Any suggestion for 16M serial flash memory chips?

You meant it's big because of the footprint of AT90USB* series or the size of miniUSB port is too big?

I think it's material costs. Extra feature means many unnecessary GPIO ports, USART, etc, i.e. PCB layout is not one of the extras :)

Thanks for the pointer, I found:

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and the size of the unit shown on
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fits the size of my giant wrist :)

But this one gets me thinking about whether I should go with USB due to footprint considerations. Maybe I'll be better off going with miniSD. However, I'm not sure what are the challenges, and for power/footprint considerations, whether I should use raw wave files of mp3 (that means a decoder).

From your comments, I guess microSD is the way to go. For this project, I don't think I need an operating system on it, but I have no idea how to deal with file systems in microcontrollers. Can you give me some references to get started?

Thanks a lot. I'll keep you updated.

Cheers, Hoi

Reply to
Hoi Wong

I have seen only one or two wristwatch size mp3 players. If a manufacture with full electronic and mechanical resources available to them are not doing it every day, How are you going to do it in your classroom.

Googleing for "diy mp3" will get you FAT16/FAT32 file reader code for many 8/14/16 bit single chip cpus, some written in C.

The project you did find has source code for FAT32. Modify existing code will make the entire project doable for a beginner.

After you get this one done (or any other you like), you can then tackle other projects like this.

Good Luck

donald

Reply to
donald

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