Audio boards
Trigger-driven sound boards, UART MP3 players, short-loop voice recorders, speech recognition modules, and Raspberry Pi DAC/codec boards all live here. Who controls playback determines which one fits.
Adafruit Audio FX boards and WAV Trigger for standalone playback, DFPlayer Pro and Gravity MP3 for MCU-scripted audio, EasyVR for speech recognition, Fermion/Gravity voice recorders, and Pi I2S DAC/codec boards.
- Adafruit's Audio FX Sound Boards play WAV/OGG from onboard flash when a trigger pin fires — no microcontroller required; the WAV Trigger is the polyphonic step up, mixing up to 14 stereo WAV tracks simultaneously.
- Fermion DFPlayer Pro (dual channel, 128 MB) and Gravity's 8 MB mono MP3 module are UART-controlled players for when an Arduino or ESP32 scripts the audio; the EasyVR module adds speech-command recognition over serial.
- Pi-side boards are I2S DACs and codecs, not players: Waveshare's PCM5122 HiFi DAC and WM8960 codec, the DA7212 board with dual onboard mics, and the HiFiBerry Digi+ for digital output.
- Voice recorders trade fidelity for autonomy: Fermion's recorder module stores 40 minutes, while Gravity's WTR096 and the BOSON recorder store roughly 10 seconds for talking-prop projects.
