The Talking Clock is coming along pretty good. However, I wanted to add a little flare to it. When the clock annunciates the time, I thought it would be really cool to have some LEDs come on. Maybe fade in and then fade out. With all the buttons that I have, the audio amplifier, and the VS1053 breakout board, I’ve pretty much run out of I/O. How am I going to PWM multiple RGB LEDs with only 1 pin left? The answer was Neopixels. Read More...

In my last post for the VS1053 breakout board, I left off with simply playing an MP3 by pressing a button. Basically a "Hello World" for the breakout board. Now it's time to dig in and see what it'll take to make a talking clock. Read More...

This is going to be sweet. I got my hands on Adafruit’s VS1053 MP3 Breakout Board. Making a talking clock should be pretty easy with this! Read More...

I last left off with my Audio Amplifier PCB being a total bust. Well, not a total bust. It probably works, but I’ll never know. I’ll never be able to solder the super-tiny 8SON package that I put in version 1. Once I received the larger 8MSOP version from DigiKey, it was obvious that it was the size to use. It definitely looks like I’ll have less difficulty soldering it by hand. Read More...

My mini audio amp practice boards came in. I wasn’t too sure if I’d be able to solder the TPA2005D1 chip or not. Rather than waste $45 on the LCD Clock V2 PCB and make a mess of it, I figured it would be a good idea to make a practice board based off SparkFun’s breakout board. If I can’t solder the part by hand, then I’ll just incorporate SparkFun’s audio amp breakout into my clock PCB as a daughterboard. Read More...

Yes. It farts. That’s pretty funny. Read More...