Music is everywhere and is part of us all. Therefore, we all want to have a powerful portable speaker. We have built a two-channel, D-type wireless amplifier, which will drive a homemade, battery-powered portable speaker. The speaker has two drivers, a tweeter, and a woofer. Portable speakers are nothing special these days as they are widely available. The aim of the task was therefore to make something unique, which we achieved by designing and building a tuned wooden speaker enclosure and amplifier, on which we can digitally process the sound and adapt it to our taste.
The amplifier’s wireless connectivity was achieved by choosing an ESP32 microcontroller that has built-in Bluetooth. In addition to wireless connectivity, the microcontroller also enables the implementation of various digital filters, which can be used to further process the sound. Digitized sound is converted into an analog signal with the help of a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), which is used to control two integrated amplifier circuits. Each amplifier circuit powers its own driver, which means that we can digitally adapt the signal to meet the specific characteristics of each driver. In this way, we needed fewer components on the circuit board and achieved higher output power and better efficiency. Besides the wireless connectivity, the amplifier board has also the possibility of connecting an analog signal to its input. For that purpose, we added the analog-to-digital converter (ADC). Both of the converters are external integrated circuits since the selected microcontroller does not have converters with a high enough resolution.
The software code that we have developed on the microcontroller is designed around the example of transmitting sound via Bluetooth connection, prepared by the manufacturer of the selected microcontroller. The entire code was written in the C programming language using the Visual Studio Code programming environment. To speed up the development process we used simulating software tools like LTspice and VituixCAD.
The finished product met all expectations. It has passed some initial tests, which showed that it has very low distortion at an output power of 70 WRMS per channel. Microcontroller signal processing has proven to be very useful, as it allows effortless signal adjustments without needing to change circuit components.
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