One of our favorite scenes from the [James Bond] franchise is the classic exchange between [Goldfinger] and [Bond]. [Connery] (the One True Bond) says, “You expect me to talk?” And the reply is, “No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!” When it comes to the ESP32, though, apparently [XTronical] expects it to talk. He posted a library to simplify playing WAV files on the ESP32. There is also a video worth watching, below.
Actually, you might want to back up to his previous post where he connects a speaker via one of the digital to analog converters on the board. In that post, he just pushes out a few simple waveforms, but the hardware is the same setup he uses for playing the WAV files.
By wrapping up the WAV code in a library, [XTronical] makes the actual playback simple. Here’s the core of his simple example:
void loop() {
static uint32_t i=0; // simple counter to output
if(ForceWithYou.Completed) // if completed playing, play again
DacAudio.PlayWav(&ForceWithYou); // play the wav (pass the wav class object created at top of code
Serial.println(i); // print out the value of i
i++; // increment the value of i
}
Not very hard, but, of course, the heavy lifting is hidden in the two objects PlayWav and ForceWithYou. The video explains how you can add more, but you can probably guess, too. The short version is he uses Audacity to prepare the WAV file and then a hex editor to get the bytes into an array. Since many of us use Linux or Cygwin, we might have been tempted to use od or hexdump, but however you do it, it has to wind up in an array.
If you want to experiment more with waveform generation, [Elliot Williams] did a good piece on that. You might also get some ideas from our signal generator.
For some reason evil villains always want to tell the good guy their plans.
I would never do that.
I guess that’s what makes them evil.
Reminds me of Frozone from the Incredibles
“He’s got me right where he wants me, but what does he start doing. He starts monologuing!
These villain go through a lot of effort to organize some evil plot and without appreciation it’ll just feel incomplete.
The whole world of internet social media is built on the concept, so it’s pretty universal.
I don’t see where the wireless benefits of the ESP32 come in handy.
I’m guessing [XTronical] just had one laying about. I could be wrong.
A talking wireless clock so you don’t need Nixie tubes. It’s the future! A reasonable library of numbers read by your favorite person might fit in internal flash, but I don’t know. Maybe you need to branch out to SPIFFS or something.
Could the ESP32 be used to stream the array file and play it directly? I know this is wrapping it into a library, but that can’t possibly be the best implementation on a wireless platform.
maybe support for RTP streaming? SIP?
The ESP32 has builtin hardware support for I2S witch you can use to output stereo sound directly using the internal DAC (2 channels) among a few other options. And this all can be done using DMA transfer.
Combined with the Wifi-unit you can even use it as a webradio: https://github.com/Edzelf/ESP32-Radio
That project uses an external decoder chip for the mp3 decoding.
You can even go a step further and do it on the ESP32 itself like in this project:
https://github.com/kodera2t/ESP32_OLED_webradio
use voip to make an acoustic modem setup
If you are going to use audacity to “prepare” wav file you might as well use it to prepare a raw file and play it with nodemcu. I built a grandfather clock chime with an 8266-01. It gets it’s time sync from my router and plays 1/2, 1/2. 3/4/ and the full Westminster chime on the quarter, half, three-quarter, and hour, and bongs out the hour’s just like a grandfather clock.
Care to share your code?
There’s no need to convert the audio file into an array to be put in a .h file. The toolchain and makefiles does that automatically. Just put a reference to the file in the “component.mk” like this:
COMPONENT_EMBED_FILES := sound.wav
and then declare an array in the source like this:
extern const uint8_t sound[] asm(“_binary_sound.wav_start”);
easy-peasy….
Not exactly easy-peasy. An example would be very helpful
Minor correction about the sample rate… it isn’t a measure of the number of “bytes”, it’s a measure of the number of samples… otherwise it’d be called a “byte rate”. We do sometimes measure quality in terms of data units per second; usually we call that the bit rate. Sample rate is just one variable that decides the bit rate for uncompressed audio.
Bit rate = Sample Rate × bits per sample × channels
So in the case of 8-bit mono audio, you indeed get sample rate = “byte rate”, but that won’t hold true if you, say, use 16-bit samples.
As for minimum sample rate, a big factor will be the highest significant frequency present in the wave form.
https://stuartl.longlandclan.id.au/blog/2015/01/03/a-horn-for-the-bicycle/
The bell sound effect there is one example where going to 4kHz sample rate really is not sufficient, as the highest frequency component is about 2.2kHz. If you sample that at 4kHz, you’ll get an alias of that component at 200Hz. Audacity will likely try and filter out that alias, which may completely change the sound you were wanting to reproduce.
It’s wise to look at the spectrum analysis of the waveform of interest before deciding on a sample rate, pick the highest significant frequency, double it, then add some more to give yourself some transition band.
Some places where arrays and streaming can be used effectively, true…but good write up either way.
Guess who’s going to implement an audio alarm into the refrigerator sensors in the home automation….HEHEHE The spousal unit will be quiet upset. The food will be edible.
Hey, it took out my evil tags on the HEHEHE….rats.
Or use a DFPlayer Mini ($5-$10). Play hundreds of MP3 files on a micro-sd card. So easy and cheap. Mono and/or stereo. It’s really small in size too.
Hopefully if you look at the latest version and what I use it for it was never designed to just be a simple digital sound player, that was just the start. See latest videos on this project
DacAudio V4
https://youtu.be/fRvavKaWKms
Frogger on ESP32
https://youtu.be/isvPum2VBW8
It was initially designed to help me produce the sounds for writing games on the ESP32 which would not work with an MP3 player, not even sure if DMA access is an easy option for my needs.
Made the same project last friday. Uses a SPIFFS image to play a random RAW files via I2S. Its going to have a big red button, and it says “no” in various ways.
Sound through a filtered output is a standard module in NodeMCU isn’t it?
I’m not sure why this is portrayed as something needing new code.
A library that not only makes the ESP32 talk, it also makes the Force be With You.
On linux, to convert any binary file to a C char array simply do:
xxd -i filename