Our latest offering direct from Forge Electronics is a very exciting 16
channel sound module. This unit was designed to replay up to sixteen
different recorded sound effects on radio controlled model boats, but
will doubtless find application in other radio control projects. So far
it has been used to great effect in several battleships to create
various types of gunfire, sound horns and klaxons, make ASDIC ‘pings’,
sound ‘General Quarters’, make aircraft and helicopter fly-bys etc. All
the hard work is done by a commercially available embedded mp3 player
module (the “DFPlayer Mini” seen in the picture above) and the unit’s
microcontroller chip simply serves to decode a spare (proportional)
radio control channel used to trigger the sixteen sound tracks. A radio
controlled volume control has been implemented using a seventeenth
channel.
The (user added) sound files are stored on a microSD card (uses 1GB to
32GB cards formatted FAT16 or FAT32) and the player supports MP3 and WAV
files with all of the most common sampling frequencies (kHz): 8 /
11.025 / 12 / 16 / 22.05 / 24 / 32 / 44.1 / 48.
The output is monophonic, and stereo tracks are represented as such. A
microSD card populated with demonstration tracks is supplied with the
unit, and users can thereafter replace them with their own tracks via a
card reader on their computer (internal card slot or USB gizmo). There
are a great many sound effect libraries on the web from which sounds may
be downloaded, usually in WAV format, so a good sound editing package
like Audacity (free!) is handy if it is desired to convert them to MP3
format. It can also be useful to clean up lead-in or trail-out artefacts
etc. and set the relative volume levels of the tracks with respect to
each other. A small speaker is supplied with the unit but provision has
been made for any suitable 8 Ohm speaker to be attached. Click Here to view the item.