AudioTools: Adding Support for the ESP32‐S3 AI Smart Speaker Development Board

Recently I found the ESP32‐S3 AI Smart Speaker Development Board on Aliexpress for around 15 USD. It has quite some interesting functionality:

• ES8311 Codec DAC Chip
• ES7210 Codec ADC Chip with stereo microphones
• SD Card
• 6 Neopixel Multicolor LEDs
• A PCF85063A Real Time Clock
• 3 User Definable Keys
• GPIO interface
• camera interface
• lcd interface

This week I got this board in my mailbox and I expected it to be quite easy to be added to my Audio Driver project:

Oh boy, was I wrong!

The  stumbling block was, that a TCA9555 port extender was used for some critcal pins, so they can’t be addressed with the regular Arduino digitalWrite() and digitalRead() and without this, there is no DAC output, no working SD drive and no user keys.

After extending both the AudioTools and AudioDriver projects I have it finally working quite nicely now. So if you want to use this board as described, don’t forget to install the latest versions of these projects.

Examples

You can find the examples that demonstrate how to use this board in this examples folder of the AudioTools. After you understand how things are working you should be able to adapt all other examples as well just by replacing the AudioSource or Sink with a AudioBoardStream board(ESP32S3AISmartSpeaker);

Information

• Further information can be found in the Wiki of the AudioDriver project
• For your reference: Here is the source code of the board definition for ESP32S3AISmartSpeaker  which might be helpful if you find some other unsupporte boards.