I'm looking for a small recording device, that is just capable of recording a stereo audio stream, created by a chip like the Cirrus Logic CS5361, to a sd card.
I assume the arduino is not capable of producing a clock signal with a small enough amount of jitter to get a decent audio quality. When using the cs5361 as clock master, is it necessary to synchronize the arduino? How would i do that?
When running the cs5361 at its highest sample rate of 192kHz it's going to spit out its bits at a rate of 192.000 x 2 channels x 24 bits = 9.216 MHz. The arduino M0 at 48 MHz should chew that away easily, even with handling the sd-card writint in parallel. Correct?
3)How difficult will the electrical issues be that i'm running into? I have almost no knowledge in electrical engineering and would at least need an idea what to expect. This is not a project that i try to solve within weeks, but i should at least be able to make some progress...
I hope i made my expectations and questions quite clear and am really looking forward to your advice.
For the electrical/electronic issues, you should read and understand the typical connection diagram shown in section 3, the Recommended analog connections in section 4.4 and figure 24, and section 4.7 about grounding and power supply decoupling. This is not something you can throw together on a breadboard. The chip is a SOIC (or worse yet, a TSSOP) whose pins are 1 millimetre apart (see 6.0).
Have a look at the Teensy 3.2 (or 3.5 or 3.6) and the audio board. Most of the hardware work is done for you. all you have to do is some software and the packaging.
The audio board of Teensy looks as if it would solve my needs immediately, but on the cost of not learning how to interface to another hardware chip - which is exactly what i would want to learn...
Yes, but you said "I have almost no knowledge in electrical engineering" so the question is, do you have a lot of experience in soldering? Soldering a 24-pin SOIC to that board is not a trivial task if you have no experience. You'll spend a lot of time cleaning up solder bridges and possibly overheating/destroying the chip in the process - an expensive lesson
but on the cost of not learning how to interface to another hardware chip
I think you'd be better off starting with a purely digital chip to interface to instead of one that requires a quality audio interface as well. Maybe a DS3231? Once you've got something like that working, then proceed to a CS5361.
el_supremo:
the question is, do you have a lot of experience in soldering?
That is a good question, and answer is certainly no.
There is an electronics DIY-workshop round the corner with very helpful people - allthough they have no experience with audio hardware i'm pretty sure they can teach me how to solder a clock chip in a flash. Good advice here.
Allthough i'm thinking of not using the DS3231, as it is only 4€ cheaper than the CS5361 - are there even cheaper chips with a comparable form factor that are waiting for destruction?
One thing that occurred to me was that some memory chips are cheap. I perused this listing at Digikey.
It is sorted by price. Ignore anything which does not have a Minimum Quantity of 1.
As an example (but not a recommendation), these 32kbyte EEPROMs are only 35cents each.
They would be good practice and they will also be relatively easy to test since they use I2C and can each be set to one of 8 addresses. Four of them will fit on the Adafruit adapter you linked to and if all four are functional you'll have 128kB of EEPROM which might come in useful for something. Initially, I would test them individually, making sure that the I2C Scanner sketch finds their address (0x50) and then changing the address lines to give them each a unique address.
You may find that it is fairly expensive ($100+) to solder SOIC chips properly/easily. You'll need a decent soldering iron (better yet, a soldering station with temperature controlled iron) with a fine tip. A magnifying headset would be nice too - at my age it is essential!
But this is getting more and more complicated. Maybe you'll need to rethink this project!
