I recently purchased a Sparkfun wav trigger (April 2019) and I finally found the time to work on my project with it.
I created 16 wav files, 001-Name.wav … 016-name.wav
I have hooked up speakers and a 9V power adapter.
I am just testing, so I left everything as default and just copied my sound clips to the micro sd card. The SD card is 32 Gigs, formatted as Fat32. The sound files are small.
I power on the wav trigger, and the LED light blinks every 3 seconds or so.
I touch the two pins together to test the sound and nothing happens. No sound comes out and it does not work for any of the 16 sets of pins.
That is I touch pin 1 + pin 1 ground, pin 2 + pin 2 ground, … pin 16 + pin 16 ground.
Sorry to hear you are having trouble with your WAV Trigger. Can you try loading the sample WAV files from [this section of our Hookup Guide along with the demo .ini file described and depicted there? Testing with headphones on the 3.5mm jack would be best here but if you need to use speakers and are using the on-board amplifier, make sure you are connecting to the correct pins as outlined in [this update page for the WAV Trigger as the silk on the board for those pins can be a bit confusing if you are not sure what you are looking for.
Same problem here. Powers up via 9v DC, blinks three times, the onboard button triggers the first wav file (the Melotron test set from the download section is loaded with the included init). The triggers do nothing when connected to ground as per instructions. Further to this, when the DC plug is disconnected and I try to feed 5v to Vin and supply ground to GND the status led doesn’t light and a constant high frequency buzz is immediately heard. Short circuit somewhere on the PCB? I would appreciate an opinion from Robertsonics as I will have to deal with the shop I bought the wav trigger from. Thanks!
Andy Mo: The on-board button will play the lowest number track on the microSD card, whereas each trigger will only play the corresponding track number, i.e. Trigger 1 plays track 1. The Mellotron samples are named to map to MIDI note numbers, not triggers, so unless you rename the Mellotron sample files to begin with 0001_ thru 0016_, the triggers will not play them. Also, you have to close the solder jumper (see the schematic) to be able to power the WAV Trigger with an external 5V.
To both of you: The most likely reason the triggers aren’t working when everything else seems ok is that your wav files are not the correct format. The WAV Trigger will only play 16-bit, 44.1kHz, stereo wav files without any meta data. Any other file format will simply be ignored.
Thank you for your input, Mr. Robertson, I really hoped I am doing something wrong. I will follow your advise regarding renaming the Melotron samples so that they can be triggered. I thought I was going mad, because the multimeter shows ~3.15 volts at each trigger waiting to be shorted, and when I edited the init file to have a couple of triggers to trigger by an external pulse there was 0 volts on the specific triggers, so all appeared to be working correctly. It all makes sense now.
I also take your note about closing the solder jumper, I’ve missed this point when reading the instructions as I was going to use the DC jack and only tried the Vin/GND points as I tried to troubleshoot what’s wrong.
TS-Chris, thanks for chipping in, I used the Vin/ GND at the left part of the board, below the DC jack. On the picture below it is marked “1” together with the DC jack. But as Mr. Robertsons explained, I hadn’t closed the solder jumper, so it couldn’t have been working like this. I will follow the advice and will report back so that we can hopefully close the topic.
Andy Mo: Vin, whether supplied to the barrel connector or to the Vin terminals, should be between 6V and 15V (less than 12V preferred if you’re using the on-board amplifier). Since this feeds a 5V regulator, it needs to be at least 6V. If you applied 5V to Vin, then I would not expect this to work. The solder jumper I referred to allows you to bypass the onboard 5V regulator and supply 5V directly via the pin labeled “5Vin” on the serial connector. This is most convenient when using an FTDI-Basic 5V since that will then power the WAV Trigger from your computer’s USB 5V.
Robertsonics: All is working fine, thanks for the kind support! Turns out I was indeed naming the samples wrong, “0001 Track.wav” instead of “0001_Track.wav”. Tested it yesterday, works a treat, brilliant little board. I take notice regarding powering it, I initially thought this was for 5 volts to power it directly from/ along other 5/3.3 volt projects or a breadboard. Hopefully this will be useful for the original poster as well.
This is driving me insane. I have stripped my Super WAV Trigger setup down to the bare bones and still cannot get reliable functionality. No idea what I am doing wrong.
Some Micro SD cards work and others do not. All are formatted the same. FAT32 with 32K allocation size.
I had two WAV files that worked but now none work.
So I took things down to the basic minimum. I am powering the Trigger directly at 5v using a MeanWell power supply. I have a micro SD card with nothing but the demo WAV files. I have wires connected from output 1L and 1GND to a DROK 5W amp. And I have a simple 8ohm speaker connected to one of the amp outputs.
I power things up and wait. I observe a blinking blue light every couple of seconds (which the troubleshooting guide claims to mean that the micro sd card is unreadable, but I have learned to ignore that because I learned that the blue lamp would go solid during play duration). I manually short the pins for track 1. Back when I had a couple of WAV files that played, this would initiate play of file “001_whatever”. Now all I get is a few quick beeps followed by a series of clicking noises. And this is even with a freshly formatted micro sd card with nothing but the demo files, all in the root.
So here I am. One working micro sd card, one demo file downloaded fresh, one 5v power connection direct to the Super WAV trigger, one output to a simple amp and speaker. I cannot figure out how I could make this any simpler, and yet it still fails.
Chris, my order number was #4125752. I am talking about the tiny blue LED “STATUS” lamp next to the micro SD holder. I can post a video of it if you need to see that it does, indeed, flash blue.
OK, you have a Tsunami, not the regular WAV Trigger, which this post is about that’s why I was confused.
When you apply power, the board will initialize, and indicate readiness by blinking the status LED three times. From then on, the LED pulse every few seconds, indicating that the board is alive, and waiting to be triggered. Is this what you’re seeing?
What capacity card are you using? You need a card that’s smaller than 32GB and even then not every card will work. (See [this page for information on SD cards.) You might need to try a few different cards to see what works best.
If all that fails, try using a micro USB cable for power and connecting headphones or earbuds directly to the output and see if that works. It could be that something has damaged the board, but it sounds like it’s something more simple. If you could provide some photos of the top and bottom of the board, that would be helpful as well.](microSD Cards For Audio — Robertsonics)
Yeah, I knew that this was a WAV Trigger thread and I was struggling with the Super WAV Trigger (Tsunami), but I thought it was close enough to not warrant a separate thread. That is why I stated Super WAV Trigger in my first post.
I am ordering new micro SD cards that should be here later this week. The SanDisk Ultra 16G, Class 10 which is on the list as tested and approved. I can start there, and begin over.
By the way, for the record I also simplified and am using the mono driver.
