Built this device together with my son. Testing all the buttons, sliders and encoders went fine. Playing music however was hardly possible as it continued to skip and stutter. This happened even when we were just playing a single song, without touching any of the controls.
Iāve assembled many electronic devices before and Iāve checked all the soldering which looked perfect.
Iāve tried to use another power supply (original raspberry pi 4 supply which is known for its stability), but this didnāt solve the issues.
Iāve tried a different high quality SD card, but this also didnāt solve the issue.
Tried it with headphones andā¦ it suddenly worked perfectly fine. So I started to suspect the speakers.
Diconnected one speakerā¦ and all of a sudden the device worked fine. Disconnected the other speaker (reconnected the other) and it continued to worked fine.
Then I decided to measure the resistance of the speakers which should be 4 ohmsā¦ BUT the one speaker measures just 3 ohms and the other just 2.8 ohms. Which is 25% off of their stated value
My guess is that the DAC / Amplifier cannot handle the +25% offset of what they are supposed to be.
Again, disconnecting one speaker (I decided to disconnected the 2.8 ohm) fixes all the issues.
Maybe this can be of help to some others.
Kind regards,
Wesley
P.S. Circuitmessā¦ you can, but do not have to send new speakers.
If you find my earlier post, I had the same problem. I modified the speaker wiring so the two speakers were connected in series. The amp chip is mono and has an output impedance of 4 ohms. When you connect the two 4 ohm speakers in parallel, as designed, this halves the speaker impedance to 2 ohm, lower than the amp can apparently handle.
= Cheap hardware. I was so happy to see this kind of kickstarter. I had high hopes for Jay-D after spencer being a flop. I will post a new issue about my bent pins with day-d. I believe circuit mess has great ideaās, they just impliment with the most cheapest components possible.
I have had the adafruit adabox since the beginning, and none of circuit mess , and their products would have had anything similar to Circuit mess fails, they greatly once again when it comes to producing something for a young mind. FFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
Sorry, Bo but I like to disagree with you. The prices for these boxes are really really fair and the quality is always very good, considering the price being paid and the purpose of these boxes. They are very well balanced.
And instead of calling it a fail, an educator should see this as a nice chance to do some debugging together and teach your kid some troubleshooting. Learn them, that almost nothing in life is perfect and things sometimes need a little bit of extra attention to get it to work for you. Learn to cope with setbacks.
That however requires for the educator to have a little bit of a more positive mentality.
Aha! CM have just published the Jay-D schematics and there is a 150 resistor on the speaker -ve between the headphone socket and the speaker. āOh ma heidā as we say here is Scotland. I need to dig out those electrical engineering booksā¦
