[beagleboard] BeagleBone Black & Audio

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1

Well, I am sure there are a lot of people that want something else added to the board. If I added all those features, at it would cost a LOT more that the current price can support. It can’t have everything on it.

There is a cape that can plug in, called the Audio cape, that can give you access to the audio jacks. The audio cape was less expensive than the original BeagleBone. We build the BeagleBone Black in 100K quantities. The audio cape is not built in 100K quantities, but in quantities of 100. That means the parts cost more and that results in the board costing more.

Gerald

2

Gerald,

I am looking for a similar solution. Apart from using the audio cape, which is of course a perfectly good solution,
what do you suggest if I want to connect a PCM source to the BBB? We will be designing our own PCB for this,
I know the Audio Cape is opensource hardware, so we can use that, but do we really need it, or can we connect
from a PCM source directly?

Thanks for any insights,
Ron

3

The full McASP is available on the expansion connectors. Just configure it to accept the PCM data and write your SW. No CODEC is needed. You do not need the audio cape.

Gerald

4

Gerald,

Thanks! Much appreciated! Is this supported in recent kernel version as an ALSA device?
I am very willing to do my own research on this, but can you point me in the right direction for that part too?

Many thanks
Ron

5

I am not exactly sure. I will defer this to the software folks. If not, there should be plenty of references out there you can look out to get it going.

Gerald

6

There are USB audio dongles under $10.

7

Jason,

Does your recommendation to purchase a USB audio dongle mean that there won’t be support for the audio cape on the BeagleBone Black? I have an audio cape but it isn’t currently working on the Black. The logs show that the device tree and firmware for the cape is loaded, but it isn’t recognized by alsa. I’m running 3.8.11 Angstrom.

8

Gerald

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It’s not a conclusion - it’s a question. I’m just wondering if there are plans to support the audio cape on the BeagleBone Black. It isn’t currently working for me, and I’d like to know if it should be working, if the support for it is in progress, or if there are no plans to support it.

10

Yes. There is a plan to support all of the existing capes if possible. All are being worked on as we speak, but it is going to take some time They all have to updated to the 3.8 kernel and some may require some design changes in order to work with the eMMC. It all depends on the cape and the design of the cape. Device Tree complicates a lot things and the Cape Manager is intended to help solve that, but as I said, it will take some time.

Gerald

11

Gerald,

Thanks for your speedy response. I know you guys are getting hammered with posts saying that various things aren’t working on the BeagleBone Black, but overall I’m really impressed with it. This was an outstanding effort - great job!

12

Thanks! Capes is the top of our list, not counting all the little things that are giving us issues! This new kernel is different than the 3.2 version.

Gerald