Arduino Walkie-Talkie Produces Marginal Audio Quality

When riding a motorcycle or moped — with a helmet, of course — talking to fellow riders can be difficult. There is a solution in the form…

Jeremy Cook
5 years ago

When riding a motorcycle or moped — with a helmet, of course — talking to fellow riders can be difficult. There is a solution in the form of helmet-mounted radios, but as hacker GreatScott! notes in his latest video, these can be quite expensive. Another alternative would be to simply build one yourself, which he’s attempted to do in his latest video with a pair of Arduino Nano boards with nRF24L01+ transceivers.

The result of the breadboard-based experiment was “successful” audio transmission, but with very bad audio output on the receiving unit’s speaker. Poor quality aside, the actual method of transmission had been proven, and GreatScott hypothesized that this issue here was a result of the breadboard connections. He went ahead and designed a PCB to hold the components, including an ATmega328P-AU microcontroller instead of the full Nano.

These new boards were then constructed, and programmed with an Arduino Uno acting as an ISP, resulting in audio quality that was… actually still quite poor. Regardless, the concept seems to work on some level, so it could be a good place to start researching if you want to build something similar. GreatScott! is quick to point out that he could have made an “obvious and dumb mistake,” and you can check out his PCB here if you’d like to critique his design!

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
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