Adding a speaker to the badge - explorations

[jcfield-boop]

So I had a broken webcam with a speaker and wanted to see if I could enhance the existing apps with some sounds - this model is low profile and can stick on the back of the badge (I think it's generally available online too)

I was able to add some simple beeps and tones using the GPIO pin, but (admittedly a lot of time with my buddy Claude Code) gave up on trying to add some kind of speech synthesis (e.g. Software Automatic Mouth ) or other audio output as some kind of amplifier would also be needed.

I've attached the sound utility that I used to augment the built in apps.

sound_utils.py

[martinwoodward]

That's awesome work! Thanks for sharing. If anyone wants to try this but doesn't want to solder onto your badge, you can make use of the I2C port, I keep a pack of these handy for connecting stuff up. https://amzn.to/43bbHud. While it's labelled I2C, it's just two GPIO pins plus ground and power so you can do anything you want with it (with last years badge I actually used that port to wire up a WiFi daughterboard before we added it to the badge hardware this year).

However, adding the through-hole GPIO pins to the top with the standard header pin separation was my idea and I'm thrilled to see people taking advantage of it 😀

Maybe we should add sound to the default apps next year, but leave the speaker off the board itself however have some available at the makerspace / badge hacking area for people if they want noisy badges.