Chirp’s Explorer Board Lets You Send and Receive Data-Over-Sound

Nearly a week ago, London-based audio tech startup Chirp announced the Chirp Explorer Board — an IoT development board that’s designed for acoustic data transfer possibilities. Chirp designed the board around an Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller with built-in FPU for DSP (Digital Signal Processing) capabilities, which allows users to create IoT projects around the embedded platform.

Chirp states the board is equipped with an integrated loudspeaker, MEMS-based microphone, and a high-quality Cirrus Logic codec, which supports audio sample rates ranging up to 192kHz- providing everything you need to send and receive Chirp signals. While Chirp signals are commonly used in radar, sonar, and laser applications, they have found their way into spread-spectrum communications, and in this case, a form of signal hopping (CSS) that uses wideband linear frequency chirps to encode data.

Beyond the hardware mentioned above, the Chirp Explorer Board features a 3.5mm line-level inputs/outputs for connecting external peripherals, assignable LEDs/potentiometers/push-buttons, and an Arduino-compatible 21-pin GPIO with 8-channel 12-bit ADC/DAC, SPI, CAN, I2C, UART, and several multi-function hardware timers. The board is powered through micro USB, programmed over an SDW interface, which is done via the Chirp ARM SDK.

“We’ve made it as quick and simple as possible to integrate with the Chirp Arm SDK, with drop-in examples to get you up and running in minutes — no need to wrestle with handling audio I/O manually.”

The company says the Chirp Explorer Board will be shipping by the end of this year; however there’s no definitive set date or a perspective price-point. You can sign up for updates and pre-release notifications here for further information.