SparkFun Relaunches the WVR Audio Development Board, Following Completion of the Crowdfunder
With stock from the original crowdfunding run now exhausted, SparkFun has taken up the mantle and is selling WVR boards starting at $39.95.
SparkFun has announced it is now stocking Andrew John March's Espressif ESP32-powered WVR Audio Development Board, following the successful completion of its crowdfunding campaign back in 2021.
Project creator March launched the WVR family back in December 2020 with a crowdfunding campaign detailing the core WVR board and a series of accessories including a USB Backpack with MIDI Host capabilities, a Makers Board which turned the module into a ready-to-run audio playback device, and a more capable Dev Board as an "experimentation platform." March also launched the Thames, an open source "instrument engine" housed in a stomp-box enclosure, at the same time.
The project was successfully funded in early 2021, and since then March has been selling units left over from the initial production run — until supplies ran out. Now, SparkFun is taking over, offering the WVR Audio Development Board and a variant with USB Host capabilities provided by a companion Seeed Studio XIAO board — but not, at the time of writing, any of the add-on boards or devices which made up the full WVR family.
The specifications of the WVR board are unchanged from its launch. It's still built around the Espressif ESP32-WROVER-B module with a dual-core Tensilica Xtensa LX6 processor running at up to 240MHz, has 16MB of RAM, 4MB of flash memory, and an 8GB eMMC module capable of storing up to 12 hours of uncompressed audio at a 16-bit 44.1Khz resolution. There's an optically-isolated MIDI input, 14 GPIO pins with eight offering analog inputs, and Wi-Fi connectivity.
The stock WVR firmware offers the ability to play back 18 stereo WAV files simultaneously with a ~1ms latency, sample-accurate looping, and comes with a web interface accessible over Wi-Fi — complete with the ability to handle compressed audio, including MP3, OGG, and FLAC, in addition to uncompressed WAV files. The firmware is open source and customizable in the Arduino IDE.
The WVR Audio Development Board is available on the SparkFun store now at $39.95; the version with USB Host capabilities is priced at $49.95.