Play sound on Nano33BLE

[simonhauser]

Hi all,
I have a xiao nRF52840 which has a 2 MB QSPI external flash on board. For my project I had the idea to use this memory to store audio files (in some suitable format) and play them when wanted. This requires two steps: 1) write and read audio files to the QSPI flash, and 2) play the audio on a mini speaker. Turns out that both of these steps are not trivial , but since the Nano33BLE has the same chip, I'm hoping to find guidance here.

For step 1, I found the FS_Nano33BLE library, and it looks like with a small tweak for the xiao things can be written to and read from the QSPI flash. I would get into that, if not for...

Step 2: This is a recurring topic on this forum, but I couldn't yet find a solution on how to play sound on the Nano33BLE. I have the PCM library successfully running on a normal Arduino (Uno in this case), but it is not compatible with the nRF52840. Has anybody managed to play a simple audio file on it?

If there is really no solution for this, I might have to consider switching to another non-nRF52840 board. I wanted to use it for a bluetooth application that should comfortably run for a couple of hours. There is not too much data to be transmitted (very vague information, I know...), so maybe BLE would not be needed? What would be other possibilities to store around 1 min of audio files (split into many small pieces) and to be played on an MCU?

Thanks for all your inputs!

[simonhauser]

I've solved the sound playback with I2S on the nrf52840 chip, starting from the simple example here: I2S pins inconsistencies - Nordic Q&A - Nordic DevZone - Nordic DevZone.
Actually, this repo GitHub - aovestdipaperino/NRF_I2SPlayer seems very promising on continuing, but unfortunately it doesn't work for me. But now that I go the working example, maybe I can extract what I need from that library.

I'll soon have a look at the QSPI flash storage.