
Let’s now move to the software configuration, starting from an updated version of the Raspbian distribution. Hare are a couple of photos that show the connections listed above: You need 5 wires to connect the MAX98357 amplifier to the Raspberry Pi Zero: The speaker comes with a JST connector that I removed to be able to screw the wires in the terminal block: The breakout board is shipped with a terminal block (for the speaker connection) and with a pin strip header for the power supply and the I2S bus both of them have to be soldered to the board: I brought the components from an italian reseller, melopero: Adafruit I2S 3W Class D Amplifier Breakout – MAX98357A.Both the breakout board with the Maxim chip and the speaker are from Adafruit: This chip offers 3.2W in output and you can connect directly a small 4 ohm speaker. I chose an I2S amplifier based on the MAX98357 chip by Maxim. We can use this bus to communicate audio data between our Pi Zero and an amplifier that accepts audio input via I2S bus: word select ( WS, sometimes defined also LRCLK – left/right clock).
Word clock raspberry pi serial#
Word clock raspberry pi how to#
In today’s tutorial I’ll show you how to generate high quality audio using the I2S bus. This solution has the advantage of being very cheap and easy to make by contrast the sound quality is not very high. Even if you can find on the market some devices that extract audio flows from the HDMI stream, those devices are often expansive and bigger than the Raspberry Pi Zero itself!Ī very simple solution, well explained in a tutorial by Adafruit, is to generate the audio signal using two PWM ( Pulse Width Modulation) pins and a low-pass filter made with some passive components. Raspberry Pi Zero unfortunately doesn’t offer a dedicated audio connector: audio output is indeed normally performed via HDMI:Īlthough this is perfect for applications like media centers (where audio and video are reproduced by the monitor/television connected via HDMI), it’s not handy in embedded applications where you only need to play some audio files (for example to add audio warnings).

A help may come from the ThePiLocator website, which displays in realtime the availability of the different Pi Zero boards on the official stores. It may be sometimes difficult to buy a Raspberry Pi Zero… it’s indeed often out of stock on the different webstores.
