Microchip SAMA7G54 is a single-core Arm Cortex-A7 microprocessor for low power AI camera & audio applications

SAMA7G54 evaluation kit

Microchip has just announced the 1 GHz SAMA7G54 single-core Arm Cortex-A7 microprocessor (MPU) with MIPI CSI-2 and parallel camera interfaces, as well as up to four I2S, one SPDIF transmitter and receiver, and a 4-stereo channel audio sample rate converter. The company specifically launched a single-core processor to offer a lower power solution for AI camera and audio solutions, and the chip is coupled with the MCP16502 power management IC that has been optimized to provide the best power/performance ratio for the SAMA7G54. Microchip SAMA7G54 specifications: CPU – Arm Cortex-A7 based MPU @ up to 1GHz with 256KB L2 cache Memory – DDR2/DDR3/DDR3L/LPDDR2/LPDDR3 up to 533MHz Storage – Quad SPI, Octal SPI, 3x SD/eMMC Camera I/F – MIPI CSI-2 (2-lane up to 1.5 Gbps each) and 12-bit parallel camera Up to 8 Mpixel @ 30 fps Audio – Up to 4x I2S, PDM, SPDIF (Rx/Tx), 4 stereo channel ASRC Networking […]

Nordic Semi launches the nRF5340 Audio DK for Bluetooth LE Audio development

nRF5340 Audio DK

Nordic Semiconductor nRF5340 Audio DK is a Bluetooth LE audio development kit that enables better audio quality with LC3 codec, longer playtime, and new features such as Multi-Stream Audio and and Broadcast Audio. Equipped with the nRF5340 dual-core Cortex-M33 SoC, nPM1100 PMIC, and Cirrus Logic’s CS47L63 Audio DSP, the kit can be configured as a True Wireless Stereo (TWS) earbud, an LE Audio USB dongle, an enterprise headset, or a broadcast receiver. nRF5340 Audio DK specifications: WiSoC – Nordic Semi nRF5340 dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 multi-protocol microcontroller with support for Bluetooth 5.3 LE, Bluetooth mesh, NFC, Thread, Zigbee, 802.15.4, ANT, and 2.4 GHz proprietary; 1 MB flash and 512 KB of RAM for the 128 MHz application core, and 256 KB Flash and 64 KB RAM for the 64 MHz network core. Storage – MicroSD card holder Audio Cirrus Logic Audio DSP CS47L63 3.5mm mono headphone jack, 3.5mm stereo analog Line IN […]

PineSound is a development board for earbuds and digital audio players

PineSound development board

You may have read Pine64’s April’s Fools spoof about the PineBuds and PinePod earlier this month. It turns out those will be real, and the Pine64 PineSound development board will be used to bring the PineBuds earbuds and PinePod digital audio player to market. The PineSound board features Bestechnic BES2300 Bluetooth 5.0 audio chip, two coaxial & optical input and output, a 3.5mm headphone jack, 4.4mm and 2.5mm balanced jacks, an SMA connector, a USB Type-C connector, plus interfaces for a touchscreen display. PineSound preliminary specifications: WiSoC – Bestechnic BES2300-YP dual-core Arm Cortex-M4F @ up to 300 MHz with HW DSP instruction, 992KB SRAM, 4MB flash, Bluetooth 5.0 dual mode. Supports hybrid ANC (active noise cancellation) and TWS (true wireless stereo). Note: the datasheet has been made available in the comments section. Display – LCD (should be SPI) and touch panel connectors Audio Coaxial & optical input (left) Coaxial & […]

$8 LU-ASR01 offline speech recognition board features “TW-ASR ONE” chip

LU-ASR01 offline speech recognition module

LU-ASR01 is a board capable of offline speech recognition with a built-in microphone, a speaker connector, twelve through holes for GPIOs and a temperature sensor interface for DHT11/DS18B20,  plus a USB Type-C port for power and programming. At first, I thought it might be based on the Unisound US516P6 microcontroller which we’ve seen on some inexpensive offline speech recognition modules, but the chip looks completely different, with the marking TW-ASR ONE. So let’s investigate… LU-ASR01 board specifications took some effort, but here’s what I’ve managed: MCU – TW-ASR ONE (aka TWen ASR ONE) microcontroller with 4MB flash, 512KB RAM, and a BNPU for voice processing; package: QFN48L (6x6x0.85mm) Audio I/O Built-in microphone 2-pin speaker header plus 3W power amplifier for 4Ω/3W speaker Voice recognition Up to 10 meters wake-up range 98% ultra-high recognition rate Customizable to 5 wake-up words and 200 recognition words USB – 1x USB Type-C port for […]

Bluetooth LE audio evaluation kit supports nRF52840 Bluetooth Low Energy SoC

Bluetooth LE audio evaluation kit

Software company Packetcraft has announced the availability of its Bluetooth LE audio evaluation kit for the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 Bluetooth Low Energy SoC used to let engineers evaluate the technology and develop Bluetooth LE Audio applications. Bluetooth LE audio was first announced in January 2020 together with the LC3 audio codec, and promised to deliver a much longer battery life for your Bluetooth headphone or battery-operated speaker, as well as support for multi-stream and broadcast audio. But it’s taken some time before being adopted in chips like Qualcomm QCC305x/QCC3056 or FastConnect 7800, as well as operating systems with, for instance, Android 12 being the first version of Android with LE audio support. The kit is comprised of three Nordic Semi nRF52840-DK boards each fitted with a Packetcraft audio interface board (AIB) equipped with two 3.5mm audio jacks for microphone and speaker, plus a ground loop isolator, three 3.5mm audio cables […]

Picovoice on-device speech-to-text engines slash the requirements and cost of transcription

Speech-to-text benchmarks accuracy

Picovoice Leopard and Cheetah offline, on-device speech-to-text engines are said to achieve cloud-level accuracy, rely on tiny Speech-to-Text models, and slash the cost of automatic transcription by up to 10 times. Leopard is an on-device speech-to-text engine, while Cheetah is an on-device streaming speech-to-text engine, and both are cross-platform with support for Linux x86_64, macOS (x86_64, arm64), Windows x86_64, Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi 3/4, and NVIDIA Jetson Nano. Looking at the cost is always tricky since companies have different pricing structures, and the table above basically shows the best scenario, where Picovoice is 6 to 20 times more cost-effective than solutions from Microsoft Azure or Google STT. Picovoice Leopard/Cheetah is free for the first 100 hours, and customers can pay a monthly $999 fee for up to 10,000 hours hence the $0.1 per hour cost with PicoVoice. If you were to use only 1000 hours out of your plan that […]

SmartCow Apollo – A Jetson Xavier NX devkit for conversational AI, computer vision

SmartCow Apollo Devkit

SmartCow Apollo is an audio/video AI engineering kit based on NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX computer module designed for applications with conversational AI capabilities, such as speaker recognition and sentiment analysis. But considering a camera is included, computer vision applications should also be possible. The development kit comes with a 128GB NVMe SSD, four microphones, two speaker terminals, two 3.5mm phone jacks, an 8MP camera module, and a 2.08-inch OLED display with everything housed in a frame that keeps the module and accessories like that camera upright. SmartCow Apollo specifications: NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX system-on-module CPU – 6-core NVIDIA Carmel ARMv8.2 64-bit CPU with 6MB L2 and 4MB L3 cache GPU – NVIDIA Volta architecture with 384 NVIDIA CUDA cores and 48 Tensor cores Memory – 8 GB or 16GB 128-bit LPDDR4x Storage – 16 GB eMMC 5.1 flash Display 1x Mini DP port 7-pin SPI header for OLED display (included) […]

Khadas Tea – A MagSafe Hi-Fi headphone amplifier to play lossless audio on smartphones (Crowdfunding)

Khadas Tea magnetic headphone amplifier

From this side of the Internet, Khadas is better known for their single board computer, but the company has also made Hi-Fi audio products starting with the Khadas Tone in 2018 as an add-on board for Khadas VIM/VIM2 SBC, followed by Khadas Tone 2 Pro mini desktop Hi-Fi system in 2020. The latest audio product from Khadas is a smartphone accessory with Khadas Tea being a thin MagSafe-compatible magnetic Hi-Fi headphone amplifier based on aptX HD and LDAC capable Qualcomm QCC5125 Bluetooth SoC and ESS ES9281AC Pro DAC that sticks to the back of your phone. Khadas Tea specifications: Bluetooth Audio SoC – Qualcomm QCC5125 Bluetooth 5.0 audio chipset USB DAC – ESS ES9281AC Pro Amplifier – RT6863D (Buffer Stage) Audio I/O 3.5mm headphone jack Built-in stereo microphone for making and receiving calls over Bluetooth Sampling Rate USB: up to 32bit 384KHz @ PCM, or DSD 256 (Native) Bluetooth: up […]

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