Today I was receiving my ordered VS1053 MP3 Shield and I was curious about it’s integration with my Arduino Audio Tools Library using the Arduino UNO R4.
MP3 Streaming
The first thing I tried was the MP3 Streaming sketch. It was working – a kind of. Unfortunately the WIFI is providing the data not fast enough, so it is breaking up badly. What a disappointment: the same sketch is running perfectly on different ESP32 variants and the RP2040 Pico W.
Playing Audio with SD Library
Next I tried out the Audio Player sketch which uses the integrated SD card. The bad news here: the SD library only supports short file names, so my existing SD which contained long directory and file names did not work. I created a file with short names and that was working perfectly.
Playing Audio with SDFAT Library
So I tried the same it with the SDFAT library. I had to create a new example that shows how to set the SD up: for this use case it is critical to use SHARED_SPI! This was working like a charm also with long file names.
Conclusion
The combination Arduino UNO R4, VS1053 MP3 Shield with my AudioTools is a easy way to get into the world of audio processing! I just hope that the WIFI peformance can be improved in a future version …
2 Comments
Ale · 28. August 2023 at 11:57
interesting, where is the bottleneck? in the hardware interconnect between the renesas and the ESP? is it a library not optimised? Have you considered to put the code on the S3? using the renesas as “pass-thru”? I’m not familiar with this board, but I’m surprised is not fast enough and I’d love to know why.
Phil · 28. August 2023 at 17:47
My understanding is that the bottleneck is the serial communication between the ESP32 and the RENESAS.