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Introducing Loud-ESP32
11/13/2024 at 17:10 • 0 commentsToday, I'm ready to introduce the Loud-ESP32 board and its ESP32-S3 counterpart. This is the second generation of the Loud-ESP board and a direct successor of the Loud-ESP Duo dock.
Like other boards in the ESP Audio series, it is the same size, so you can use it with the Raspberry Pi 4 case. It has a built-in ESP32 module with PSRAM in case (external chips suddenly become inadequately expensive).
Also, I switched to the BGA version of the MAX98357 DAC. It is incredibly small, I had doubts if it can handle the job through those tiny pads. But during testing, no issues were found, it plays as good as the larger-sized QFN16 brother.
The key point of the board is to deliver good quality audio as simple as possible. It can use any USB-C charger delivering little above 2A of current (pretty much any modern phone charger), and it is surprisingly loud for the size.
To chase the low price point I decided to make most of the peripherals optional (like Ethernet or IR reader), so one can add only the things you'd really need.