Clock Radio

Trying Bluetooth Again

Fri Oct 1 2021 22:13
I love this song so much.

With the proper ESP32, Bluetooth A2DP works!

I picked up a SparkFun ESP32 Thing, not because it was particularly great, but because it was available. It's slightly odd in that it uses a 26MHz clock instead of the usual 40, but that configuration is supported so it's just a matter of poking the right configs.

You can't get an actual ESP32-DevkitC-02 for love or money right now.

There are a ton of clones of the NodeMCU ESP-32S on Amazon but this was the only dev board I was pretty sure would work as designed.

I had to find my way back to where I was with the old board. I got the SPI lines backwards and I forgot that if you don't use the bit clock on I2S, you need to tie that pin high or low. That's a real head scratcher because it just doesn't work or produces glitchy noise until you figure it out.

But we are back on track. And with a couple hundred more K of RAM, I might even be able to play some MOD files. I think it has 512K? So we're now on par with a base model Amiga A500. Minus, y'know, all the actual sound hardware. I'm tempted to get the WROVER module with the extra 8MB of RAM just to solve that problem. But it's serial RAM so it's not as fast as the internal. I'd have to do some research to see if that's even viable for real-time synth work.