SparkFun Forums

[dlarkins]

Hi all,

I've just gotten started with a Tsunami Super WAV Trigger and four TRRS 3.5mm Jack breakout boards, and I'm having some difficulty accomplishing what I want.

I work at a science museum and we're wanting to use the Tsunami to play nature sounds in a gallery themed around local wildlife. Each corner of the room has a self-powered mono speaker attached to an amplifier, with a 3.5mm cable plugged in as the audio source. This is all already built and set up. At the moment, the devices playing the sounds are 1st-generation iPod nanos! Hence the need/want to replace the system with something a little bit more "museum quality"...

When the museum closes every night, the power is turned off. As in, we literally flip the circuit breakers, and there is NO electricity coming into the gallery. So what we need is for the Tsunami to be playing 4 loops of sound (we already have the WAV files and they are properly formatted), across 4 mono outputs, "forever", with NO human interaction to start the loops.

What I'm having trouble with is how to get the Tsunami to start a loop at power-on. I know I can do this by physically soldering a jumper to each trigger, but I'd like to avoid that if possible, since we might re-use this setup for other applications later down the road.

I did find this thread that detailed a somewhat similar use case: https://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?t=47128

However, this method doesn't seem to do what I want.

I've got the four WAVs loaded onto the microSD card, named 001_Nature.wav through 004_Nature.wav.

I've got each trigger set up like this:

This does not cause the loops to start at power-on, though - I still have to connect each trigger to ground in order to start the loop.

Any advice for how to proceed would be very much appreciated. Thank you so much!

~ Dylan Larkins, Exhibit Specialist
Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum

[robertsonics]

Just change the trigger type to "Level" and make sure the "Invert" option is checked.

[robertsonics]

Also, I would advise installing (soldering) dual-row male headers in the trigger and audio pads. That way, you never have to solder wires to the board itself, and you can use small shunt jumpers to temporarily short individual triggers without soldering. Makes re-use much easier and more reliable.

[dlarkins]

Thanks for the quick reply, robertsonics - and what a great product you've created!

I've changed the trigger type to "Level" but this appears to grey out the "Loop" option. I need the tracks to loop forever. Is there any other way to achieve this?

[dlarkins]

Actually - after trying the changes you suggested, the tracks do appear to loop forever, despite the "Loop" option being greyed out and deselected. Perhaps a UI change to show the Loop option as checked when it's greyed out in this manner would be more intuitive?

Also, while the tracks are now looping forever, this did not cause them to start playing at power-up. I still had to manually start each trigger by connecting them to ground.

[robertsonics]

With the trigger type set to "Level" and the "Invert" option checked, the trigger should be continuously active on power up. I know this works with the WAV Trigger, and thought that I made it work the same with Tsunami. I'll have to review the code to be sure.

[robertsonics]

I'm guessing that perhaps you aren't running the latest firmware. See the release notes for version 1.04 on the download page; This issue was fixed for Tsunami. Grab the latest version, v1.08, and you should be good to go.