Diod.Design's Music-Visualizer LED Driver Bundles a Teensy 3.6 and ESP32 Devkit

Music visualisation specialist Diod.Design has officially launched its first product, a board which combines a Teensy 3.6, audio adapter, and ESP32 Devkit 1 into a took for driving LEDs.

"I designed this PCB because making LEDs react to music is a common project undertaken by many makers. However, it often leaves you with a mess of wires sticking out of a breadboard, and often times does not include audio input through an aux jack (which is required for high quality music-visualizers)," Diod.Design writes. "This PCB can be applied to a wide variety of LED projects, both music-reactive and non-music-reactive. It also gives the Teensy wireless controls through an ESP32 which is connected to the Teensy through TX1/RX1 ports.

"The Teensy's Audio Adapter is an extremely powerful piece of hardware that can perform the time-intensive FFT function, leaving the Teensy to perform additional analytics with FFT data and drive LEDs. However, the audio adapter does not make it very easy to hook up an aux jack as an input. But this board fixes that."

Available as a kit or in pre-assembled form, the Teensy 3.6 Music-Visualizer includes the custom PCB, a 2.5W DC-DC converter with 5-36V input, three tactile buttons, a level shifter, audio adapter, microphone, and the Teensy 3.6 and ESP32 Devkit to drive it all. Outputs for up to three LED strips are provided, though Diod.Design notes that when driving 300 or more LEDs they should be powered separately using a barrel jack splitter.

The kit is avaialble to buy now from the Diod.Design Tindie store, priced at $80 as a kit or $110 fully assembled; the source code, meanwhile, can be found on the project's GitHub repository under the permissive MIT License.