I’ve been trying to get a Little Soundie to play a short audio clip and have been running into a number of problems. I’ve done my best to diagnose the problems, following both the hookup guide and sparkfun’s general troubleshooting problems.
When first plugged in via USB, the drive reported as having around 450kB of space instead of the ~4mB. Even if some fo the flash is used for firmware (not sure if thats the case) this seems wrong.
I coulnd’t get it to play a WAV audio file, but after converting it to OGG I could get it to play sometimes. I couldn’t figure out what made the audio trigger work soemtimes when the button is pressed and not other times.
When it did work, sometimes the audio would cut out in the middle of playback if my hand brushed against the insulated portions of the jumper wires connecting the buttons. This isn’t breakign the connections, just literally if my hand made contact with the wire’s rubber insulation
After some time trying to figure it out, playback stopped working entirely and now when plugged in via USB the drive shows only one file named “NO_FLASH” and a total drive size of 16.5kB
In all of my testing, I’ve followed the drections from the hookup guide.
Its powered from 5v (a usb wall wart) with a 3.3v high trigger provided by a separate microcontroller.
All my jumpers are short-ish, less than 6 inches
The power LED always turns on, and I can hear a slight speaker pop when pressing the power button the first time or after holding it down for 5 seconds to reset, so presumably the power circuit is working fine.
The board has to visible flaws, scorch marks, broken leads, missing components, etc that I can make out with the naked eye
All these problems lead me to think I have a faulty flash chip, but I wanted to check if there are other recommendations before trying to do a return.
This is the third audio product I’ve have trouble getting to play an audio clip after giving up on Adafruit’s music maker and DFRobot’s DFPlayer. I just want to make a damn doorbell!
Hi sabeechen,
First, to address the storage issue, the Little Soundie has a 4 megabit (Mb) memory IC on it, not 4 megabyte (MB) IC so 4 megabits is roughly 500 kilobytes of storage. Formatting the chip takes a bit of space so you’re left with roughly 400-450kb of storage space. That is why we recommend using OOG files for anything more than 5-6 short sound bites.
Now, for the triggering issue, my guess is you are not creating a common ground between the microcontroller and the Little Soundie. Make sure you tie the GND pin to a ground pin on your microcontroller and that should resolve the playback interrupt issue. Most likely, since you do not have a common ground in the circuit, the trigger pin is kind of floating and minor interference will interrupt the playback. Also, make sure you are using a 3.3V logic microcontroller as the Little Soundie is NOT tolerant to 5V logic.
This should fix the issue but if you continue to have issues with the playback on your Little Soundie after creating a common ground, please take a few photos of your Little Soundie and the circuit you have it in and attach them to your response.