Tuesday, January 6, 2009

A WiFi microphone adapter Part 1

I assisted with recording a Christmas Eve carol performance. All the usual guff: set up microphones, set up mixer, connect cables, patch into PA system in building, level check, attach recorder, check record levels, record performance. Then take it all apart at end.

The single most annoying part of this procedure is laying out the cables and duct-taping them to the floor so audience doesn't trip over them. It got me thinking. Why not use radio mikes?

Obviously the quick solution was to replace the six microphones with radio mikes. Did a quick check and realised this would not be cheap. So replacement ruled out.

What about a radio adapter for the mikes? No, still hundreds of dollars per mike.

The other painful part for me at least because of the duplication of effort was the mixer and recording process. Once the performance was over I had to transfer the recording to my MacBook and process all the audio once again. And then I realised how badly mixed the audio was and it was almost unusable. Despite being complimented by one of the audience about how good the PA was, I had really messed up the mix for the recorder. My efforts at re-mixing are here: http://www.stmaryssingers.com/recordings/

If I had been able to plug the mikes into a WiFi adapter and feed the resultant packets straight into a digital audio workstation (DAW), thus recording each mike individually, and then mix the mikes and feed the resultant mix to the PA, I would have then had the luxury of a proper (re-)mix for the website recordings.

The idea of building my own WiFi mike adapter was prompted by the SEAforth 40C18 chip sitting next to my laptop. Why not use it for this? The blurb says the chip is ideal for audio and wireless applications.

My first thought was to program a fully self-contained audio to WiFi adapter. Surely it would be a simple matter to pipe audio to one of the ADCs and program the rest of the cores to send the digital packets out over a WiFi socket to my awaiting MacBook? A closer reading of the specs and blurb reveals that the chip isn't fast enough to synthesise WiFi frequencies directly and the designers expect one to use the chip to control an RF chip of some sort. I also remembered that radio is a PITA, even a moving foot or hand can have sufficient capacitance to throw off the signal. I started investigating prices of radio modules.

My initial thought was to use WiFi but I remembered there are two other protocols in the 2.4GHz band: Bluetooth and Zigbee (formerly Home RF). Zigbee was quickly ruled out because it is aimed at quite low data rates, basically for remote device data transfer and control. I also initially ruled out Bluetooth because the 10 meter range was not enough for a remote microphone. I later realised that I was reading the early Bluetooth spec and the more recent version probably has the same range as WiFi.

The other requirement for a mike adapter is battery operation which means low power consumption. Once again I thought I was home and hosed when I found an article in Elektor December 2008 for a wireless headphone kit. But the power consumption is over 100mA for transmitter module which is used. The modules are otherwise perfect for my requirements. Except for price! They are a couple of hundred dollars each.

So once again, I looked for other possibilities. I found a link to a Sony PSP being used to transmit audio over HTTP but it turned out to be a PSP with a WiFi dongle attached to the USB port.

And then it hit me how silly I had been. Bluetooth and WiFi dongles are less than $10 these days. So all I have to do is output data packets to the USB bus and the dongle can take care of the RF problems.

I was still undecided whether to use Bluetooth or WiFi. Revised Bluetooth has almost the same range as WiFi but BT is intended to run at much lower power levels so BT should be lighter on the batteries. But I found an article in Circuit Cellar Jan 2009 for an audio over Internet adapter. It sends streamed audio packets using UDP protocol over Ethernet. It's almost what I want. Most relevantly it gives full details of how to program the PC side of the system. The author, Valens, turns the audio stream into a VSTi virtual instrument and nearly all DAWs can handle VSTi these days.

So I have the C source for Valens' adapter and the C++ source for a VSTi plugin to handle the adapter. Not sure how much extra circuitry will be needed to handle the audio input. I will use one of my NT5 condenser mikes for audio input but it needs 48V phantom power. I vaguely remember an article in one of the electronics hobbyist mags for an audio mixer so presumably I can find 'phantom power' circuitry somewhere in that. Actually a phantom power XLR audio socket is the last thing I need to worry about. Any random audio input would be OK. And in fact even that isn't needed till the end. I could probably allocate a couple of the cores to generate a 440Hz sine wave and use that till the WiFi section is sorted out.

Note to self: having an internally generated audio signal could be very useful when the adapter is actually being used on a sound stage or whatever. Setting each adapter to a different note could also be useful. Each adapter will need a unique identifier for its data so can use the same ID to set audio note. (C-scale or 12 chromatics perhaps.)

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Techie vs diplomat

Overheard a conversation between a Physics major and an "International Relations" major:

Techie: "I know how to calculate the volume of oil going through a pipeline of a given volume for a given period".

Diplomat: "And I know who to ask when I need to know the volume of oil etc."