Supercon 2023: Ben Combee And The Hacker’s Guide To Audio/Video Formats

September 9, 2024 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

Media formats have come a long way since the early days of computing. Once upon a time, the very idea of even playing live audio was considered a lofty goal, with home computers instead making do with simple synthesizer chips instead. Eventually, though, real audio became possible, and in turn, video as well.

But what of the formats in which we store this media? Today, there are so many—from MP3s to MP4s, old-school AVIs to modern *.h264s. Senior software engineer Ben Combee came down to the 2023 Hackaday Supercon to give us all a run down of modern audio and video formats, and how they’re best employed these days.

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A Box With A Pocket Sized Boom

December 19, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 7 Comments

[Discreet Electronics Guy] sends in his very pocket sized boom box.

One thing we love about [Discreet Electronics Guy]’s projects is how they really showcase that a cool hack is possible without access to 3D printers, overnight PCB services, and other luxuries. Everything in this board is hand made by electronics standards. The board is etched, the vias are wires, and even the case seems to be a modified plastic mint container.

The boombox itself uses an ATiny85 at its core which plays .wav files from an SD card. This is routed through an audio amp which powers two small speakers. We love the volume knob being a board mount potentiometer. The device even features its own small LiON battery pack. If you don’t want to enjoy the deep sound of the two small speakers there’s a headphone jack.

He’s got a great write-up on the circuit design on his website and you can see a video of him presenting the project here or after the break.

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16-channel Sampler Tests Arcade Buttons With Style

August 16, 2016 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

The goal is simple: test a bunch of arcade buttons from different manufacturers to get the one with the best function and feel. The resulting build is anything but simple: this wonderfully over-designed 16-channel WAV sampler and mixer.

For those wondering why [Atarity] would go to this much trouble to test arcade buttons, we suspect an ulterior motive – skip to the 21:14 mark of the long video below to see the real design inspiration. Regardless of the motive, there’s no doubting the care that went into the build – CNC-milled birch case, extremely detailed laser-engraved graphics, and a carbon-fiber back plate covered with suede, because suede. We especially like the detail on the speaker grill: the embroidered fabric and puffed-up look really works with the rest of the design, including the leather hand strap.

It’s not entirely clear from the post what the end goal of the testing is, but we assume it’ll be some sort of MAME build. In which case, [Atarity] might want to check out our recent articles on a tabletop MAME cabinet or this portable MAME rig. But whatever he comes up with, we’re sure the craftsmanship will be there.

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Stereo Audio On A PIC32

January 11, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

The PIC microcontrollers are powerful little devices, and [Tahmid] is certainly pushing the envelope of what these integrated circuits can do. He has built (for educational purposes, he notes) an audio player based on a PIC32 and a microSD card. Oh, and this microcontroller-based audio player can play in stereo, too.

The core of the project is a PIC32MX250F128B microcontroller. 16-bit 44.1kHz WAV files are stored on the microSD card and playback is an impressive 12-bit stereo audio. It can also play back 8-bit files (with some difficulty). [Tahmid] programmed the interface to work through the serial port and it is very minimalistic, mostly because this was a project for him to explore audio on a microcontroller and wasn’t to build an actual stand-alone audio player that he would use from day to day.

Still, even though the project isn’t ready to replace your iPod, the core audio-processing parts are already done if you want to try to build on [Tahmid]’s extensive work. You could even build a standalone audio player like this but have it play high-quality 12-bit stereo audio!

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WAV Playback With An ATmega32

February 29, 2012 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[Vinod Stanur] just finished another hobby project by building a WAV audio player using a microcontroller. He had started development a while back using a PIC microcontroller. But the chip he was using didn’t have enough SRAM to allocate as a playback buffer. When he got his hands on an ATmega32 his mind turned back to the project and he saw it through to the end.

He takes advantage of what he learned on several earlier builds. He’s using a TV remote as input, just like his Snake game did. Storage is provided by an MMC card, a trick he perfected with this voice recorder project. Instead of using a FAT library, he uses his own code to read the linked-list (File Allocation Table) for sector addresses, then he parses the WAV header and processes the file accordingly.

Playback uses two 512 byte buffers. One is feeding the output while the other is being populated from the memory card. When the output buffer is exhausted the two are swapped and the process continues. You’ll find [Vinod’s] demo of the project after the break.

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Add Explosive Power To Your Hi-five

December 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 58 Comments

It’s been a while since there was any advances made in the field if celebratory high-five-ing. [Eli Skipp] just finished her contribution, moving the art forward by adding the sound of explosions to her high-fives. Ignore the audio sync problems in the video after the break to see her Arduino and Wave Shield based offering. It uses a flex sensor to detect a high-five and has a bit of software filtering to avoid misfires when moving your hand or setting it down on a flat surface. It may look a bit ridiculous right now because of the bulk, but we could see a sleeker, cheaper version hitting toy and novelty stores everywhere.

Less useful than a sign-language translating glove, but easier to code and some would say more fun too. Continue reading “Add Explosive Power To Your Hi-five” →

Homemade Music Player

October 17, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 20 Comments

Sadly, this pocket mp3 wav player doesn’t come close to the capabilities of even an iPod generation 1 yet, but you have to give [Owen] props for making it in less than 24 hours. The system consists of a Propeller MCU (cleverly wired to be swappable with “shields” similar to Arduino systems), SD card for song storage, and an LM386 for audio. While the setup is a little dull, and only plays through songs non stop with no controls whatsoever, it certainly is a good start in the right direction for a cheap and simple portable music player. Of course some planned changes are in the works, include an accelerometer (gesture based controls?), etched PCB, docking station, and a case. We’re surprised there is no form of screen planned, considering Owen appears to have a rather good handle on touch interfaces; perhaps he’s waiting for revision 3.