Garbled Audio on Wav Trigger V11

Sensors Sound & Audio
1

Hi,

I’m having issues with garbled audio on the wav trigger.

I just recently purchased a wav trigger, and I am having a few issues getting it to work. I’m using the sample tracks from sparkfun loaded in the rood directory of a 32G sanDisk sd card formatted as fat32. When I insert the sd card and plug in power (9V battery with DC connector cable) the led will sometimes blink three times indicating that it has read the file correctly and sometimes it will rapidly blink more than three times indicating that it had trouble reading the file. When it has trouble reading the file, I’ve taken the sd card out and power cycled the wav trigger a few times and then it will usually recognize the file when I insert the sd card and power on the wav trigger. If it still does not recognize the file, I usually reformat the sd card and recopy the audio tracks onto it. That process usually allows the wav trigger to recognize the files.

Once the files are recognized, I am able to play the first file by pressing the button or by connecting the trigger to ground. It sounds decent the first time it is played, but each additional time seems to introduce popping and static, until all that can be heard is the static and popping, which continues on indefinitely, much longer than the audio file would normally play. It almost sounds like it is immediately restarting the audio file as soon as it starts playing and continues doing that indefinitely.

Is this something that has been seen before and is it fixed in a firmware update? Do you think this is a hardware problem, and I need to order a new board?

I would appreciate any advice you can give.

Thanks,

Michael

Wav Trigger.jpg
Wav Trigger.jpg1842×2124 691 KB

2

I spoke with Joelle and he asked me to post this on the forums.

3

You might try another means of powering the WAV Trigger just to see if it’s the battery. Other than that, the symptoms are of hardware issues, possibly related to the microSD socket. Visually inspect the pins on the socket to make sure they are fully soldered. If you can’t resolve this, then I’d suggest contacting whoever you purchased it from for a replacement or repair.

Keep in mind that a 9V battery is typically around 400mAh to 600mAh, so that if the WAV Trigger draws 80 to 100mA, a fresh battery is only going to last somewhere around 5 hours before I’d expect things to start acting flaky due to reduced voltage. If possible, please try an AC to DC power adapter. If you must use batteries, then 4 AA in series is a much better solution than a single 9V.

4

robertsonics:
… much better solution than a single 9V.

Especially one well beyond its ‘best by’ date.

5

Good point - I missed that in the photo.