Audio Cape with Beaglebone Black

I have an audio cape that worked well with the original BeagleBone, although I’m struggling to get it to work with the BeagleBone Black. I’m running the latest 3.8.11 Angstrom release, and the logs show that it loads the device tree OK but for some reason it isn’t recognized as an alsa device. I’ll post an update if I get it working.

I’m also using this audio dongle on the BeagleBone Black, which works quite well in alsa. It only has a mono microphone input though.

Carl, so that Syba USB C-Media provides audio for BBB out of the box? the only other out-of-the-box audio i’ve seen is that chipsee 7inch LCD which has onboard audio jacks

HHNET

I may have had to use opkg to add a few alsa related packages, but otherwise it was very easy to get the Syba dongle working with the BBB. I don’t recall having to add any USB related kernel modules. Let me know if it doesn’t work for you.

Hi,

I actually haven’t heard back from TI and the progress on the HDMI rework they were working on that would supposedly restore audio cape support on the BBB with the 3.8 kernel. However, I did see a larger merge of HDMI related changes that went in to the 3.8 kernel some 2 weeks ago;

https://github.com/beagleboard/kernel/commit/fba875a9d8855812ae743098fe269848c01a5c35

Now, as far as i can tell this shouldn’t really resolve the issue as I knew it at the time when I debugged this in detail. Regardless, I attempted to build and boot the bone26 version of the kernel with HDMI disabled (optargs=capemgr.disable_partno=BB-BONELT-HDMI,BB-BONELT-HDMIN) and to my surprise this actually produces a working audio setup! In my case I’m testing with my custom audio cape which also contains an speaker amplifier, however the actual codec is the same as the Circuitco audio cape uses. This makes me think that the Circuitco cape should work as well now. Did anyone else who is attempting to use the audio cape on the BBB try this kernel? For testing I used Roberts instructions here;

http://www.eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black

Regards
Daniel

does using this audio dongle allow to record sound with microphone without biasing?

I used a MAX9812 amplifier chip and an electret condenser microphone. Works really well.

But, do we have to manually solder this amplifier and mic?I mean, is there any prebuilt device that amplifies the mic-recorded signals?

I did a quick google search and nothing obvious jumped out. You might be better off using a USB microphone, which are cheap and readily available.

How to use max9812 amp with mic (one in the headset)?

Why not try a USB headset? These are also inexpensive.

Does connecting a usb headset to beaglebone support audio recording and playback via HDMI audio interface? I think it only supports audio out. Is it so?

USB audio and HDMI audio are separate things entirely…

USB in and out

For recording voice, does usb headset’s mic work well?Does it have the appropriate pre amp to amplify the voice signals?

To record and playback audio I use gui. But how to configure beaglebone for this,as it cannot run GUIs.Can we make use of gpio pins with some sort of switches or buttons to do this? If I need to record audio, I use a “record” button in custom gui with the pc. But how to record using beaglebone alone?

Simply use arecord or aplay

That could be done while connecting BB with the computer? How can it be done when using BB alone as separate computer? The recorded audio needs to be stored,processed and played. So, how can it be done ?

Then attach a switch to a gpio and use that as your user interface to start and stop aplay and arecord

How to use the switch/push buttton to record? Is it by using gpio programming by setting the pin as input?