Little Soundie trigger

Two questions:

  1. My little soundie isn’t working as expected. I have one WAV on the board. No size problems. If I momentarily press the button, it sounds once. As expected. If held down, it plays over and over. Still expected. However, there is NO SOUND on the SECOND press. Turning the board off and on does nothing. I have to unpower the board to get it to make a sound again. Is it me? The board? What?

  2. I noticed a previous post about wiring the board so the button doesn’t need to be pushed to power it on. However, that question never seems to be answered. I don’t want to have to press the power button. How do I wire it?

If I momentarily press the button, it sounds once. As expected. If held down, it plays over and over. Still expected. However, there is NO SOUND on the SECOND press. Turning the board off and on does nothing. I have to unpower the board to get it to make a sound again. Is it me? The board? What?

This board can be a bit quirky with WAV files. You might try converting the file to an OGG and see if that helps.

I noticed a previous post about wiring the board so the button doesn’t need to be pushed to power it on. However, that question never seems to be answered. I don’t want to have to press the power button. How do I wire it?

You can connect the PB pad to a microcontroller and pull that pin high for about 1/2 second via the micro controller to turn the board on, but there’s not an easy way to wire this up to do that manually. Something has to send the signal to turn the board on, be it a button press or a digital high.

If you can build a circuit that sends a 3.3 volt signal for 500ms at powerup, that would work but I don’t have a diagram that shows how to do that.

Yes, converting the WAV to an OGG resolved that problem. Thank you!

This should be part of the product documentation… I like WAV files and that is ususally what you can get sound effects in, but even though the little soundie can play them, it can only play them once! so it should say that it is actually not supported due to this! Only use OGG files, and the retriggering works without needing to reset the thing everytime you want to play a sound again.

Maker tip: The Adafruit FX soundboard is sooo much better than this for embeded projects, actual 4MB of storage, plays OGG AND WAV flawlessly, pins/buttons needs to be grounded only and not 3,3V. Although “only” 8 inputs, it can play multiple sounds from one single button one after the other. This means it is truly standalone and can be run off a powerbank and having a small speaker attached to it! much better for basically anything you want to do.

I just got a little soundie but it seem to only have 470kb of memory. After 2 small ogg files are loaded there is no more room.

Also, I am pretty green with programming and I went searching for directions to turn up the volume on it through VLSI but couldn’t find the code. Can anyone help.

Finally, can I simply attach a noisey cricket to get mor volume out of it. I want to use it for a halloween costume and the current volume is not enough. (using a hamburger speaker)

Thanks for posting dmartyna.

I just got a little soundie but it seem to only have 470kb of memory.

There's only 4 [u]megabits[/u] of storage space on the Little Soundie and comes out to 0.5 megabytes. Formatting that to add a filesystem takes up a bit of space leaving you with a little less space. In the case of the Little Soundie, there's about 487K of total space free (a little less than 1/2 a megabyte) when you have no files on the board.

I am pretty green with programming and I went searching for directions to turn up the volume on it through VLSI but couldn’t find the code.

Sadly we have no code for that, you'd need to write your own firmware if you wanted to change volume. Unfortunately the ability to change volume is not a feature of this board and while it's possible to do, we can't offer any help on that.

Finally, can I simply attach a noisey cricket to get mor volume out of it

Yes, that's possible. You would probably want to include a larger speaker though to go with the amplifier. The Hamburger Speaker will probably distort if you send it amplified audio.