After building a school project transmitting 2.4GHz sinusoidal wave as a first year student, I got interested in the wonderful world of RF-electronics. Right after finishing that project I wanted to build something for myself. I wanted to start simple. Building electronics using ready modules is exactly that. Testing this on breadboard took 15 minutes. Programming took around another 15min. Then just soldering and documentation.
The learning process here for me was mostly reading how my audio amplifier and TEA5767 works to be precise. The modules make it easy, maybe too easy, but I wanted to understand how these IC circuits were build and why they work as they do. On the side I studied the working principle of I2C.
Some notes of this project:
- The recommended Vin voltage for Arduino Nano Every is 7-20V, but I found that 6V worked fine and the regulator dropout voltage was not too significant, leaving atleast the 5V for arduino to use.
- Currently my speakers are not sized correctly for the audio amplifier power. There is a sweet spot which is nice to listen, but adding more power might damage the speakers. If you build this project, make sure your speakers are compatible. One way to manage with too much power from audio amplifier is to attenuate the amplifier input signal, but it's a bit harder to do these modifications for the modules.
However, this project works and I tested it side by side with my RTL-SDR, which has obviously better quality. Ordering from amazon.de, this project would cost around 40€. Fortunately I had most components ready, which is the reason for mismatched speakers (alongside the fact that I didn't want to buy new ones for hobby project just for some mismatch in power). Further modification might be done to this project. As mentioned before, I might either do some modification to the amplifier board or get more suitable speakers. An idea of speed control for the frequency encoder crossed my mind and it might be implemented sometime in the future.
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