Microphone input support for CubeCell range

#1

Im a huge fan of your CubeCell boards and have deployed a number of the HTCC-AB01 for urban sensing applications. I usually work with audio based sensors and would love to develop a battery operated noise monitoring device based around the HTCC-AB01/2. Id like to be able to interface a PDM or ideally I2S microphone with the board for periodic audio sampling at 16bit/16kHz. As the ASR6501/2 modules are based on a PSoC 4000 series MCU, would it be possible to implement this kind of functionality?

Im not actually sure if a PSoC 4000 series can handle PDM or I2S audio but if it could this make for a very practical application for these boards.

Min requirements would be a single digit uA sleep current draw and the ability to handle PDM/I2S audio.

Any input from the Heltec devs or folk with the knowledge would be very much appreciated!

#2

Hi, unfortunately no answers but i’m also interesting with monitoring noise with a cubecell. Do you have progress with this ?

#3

No progress with Cubecell as I dont think the PSoC 4000 series it uses as a host MCU has the necessary power to handle PDM or I2S audio signals with any usable quality.

This dev board from Seeed is looking good as the M4 in the SoC can handle PDM/I2S audio: https://www.seeedstudio.com/LoRa-E5-mini-STM32WLE5JC-p-4869.html

It just doesn’t have the incredibly useful VEXT, solar charging, and Arduino library features that make the Heltec boards so appealing for my level of development.

Fingers crossed this kind of functionality is supported or possible!

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#4

Any devs on here have any experience working with audio on these Heltec boards?

#5

Hi there,

I did a bit of research into this and found this comparison table.

The PSoC 4100S Plus (which is what the cubecell is based on) doesn’t support I2S according to the table. That said, I wonder if it might be possible to implement I2S somehow.

There is some code for I2S in the Cubecell repo. However it is under the /asr6601 folder, so I wonder if it’s for some upcoming board. Maybe it’s possible to backport it to the asr650x.

Maybe @Supporter could shed some light on this.