I recently have bought two ESP32-A1-S boards to use them as possible voice assistants for home assistant. However, ended up with squeezelite music players which can be used for notifications and music players. Both of them work wonderfully if I use the microphone port with a cheap powered speaker.
While one of the unit is just like I described and working great as a notifier, alarm speaker, door bell etc. The second unit however I wanted to use it in a 3D printed case with 2 independent speakers. I was thinking of using the inbuilt AMP of the espboard. And here comes the issue. The speakers are playing but too faint to hear anything. It seems the amplifier might not functioning or the GPIO settings are not correct.
Now looking desperately for the solution, the documentation is very sparse. And I don’t understand how to understand my boards variation? Hence come to the experts, I am sure someone has already gone this road and probably found the answer.
Found the issue after couple of firmware switching between ESPHome and Squeezelite. The finding is, not all boards from Ali are made the same.
The first board and second board have everything visually same and seems they are even using the same DAC but one is written B440 and another B435 on the back. It seems the B440, which is supposed to be later revision or built has issues of probably some bad soldering or wrong connections on the circuit boards. I haven’t checked the mic component at all hence can’t tell the difference in that area.
After so many switch back between firmwares, scanning the I2C bus and getting the result, I was in an impression that my DAC is surely ES8388 and I was getting 0x10 as a I2C scan so nothing wrong in the firmware or settings.
Then the next test is to find out the physical board itself, hence connected the 2 3W 4Ohm Speaker to other board and immediately the music played nice and clean; loud enough for my purpose. However if I connect speakers from my second board (B440), no matter what the sound is whisper quiet. Then I tested both boards for the line outs. Line out for the first board works beautifully when fed into a $10 USB speaker. However, the same for the second board is also a problem. When volume is set to 100%, the distortion and noise is so high that my speakers fell off its position!!! And soon it can’t play anymore and a loud constant noise takes over. Probably a case of a missing humble capacitor, not sure, I cant tell the difference of the SMD electronics.
Anyway, long story short, the conclusion might help someone in future. If your board’s onboard DAC is not providing enough sound, thats not the Software but it could be the board itself.
Have you managed the get the B440 board working?
It seems to be talking to the DAC over i2c and it is detecting the it as ES8388 but I’ve got no sound over the headphones port.
I’m guessing the i2s pins must be wrong.
edit: got it working
SDA 33
SCL 32
Clcok 27
WS 25
Data 26
mute 21
Address 16
I eventually ordered another board from the supplier from whom I got the b435 board. That one worked without a single issue. B440 works if I use the line out but the sound quality isn’t great and as I reported, the speaker out port is whisper quiet and unusable unless additional external DAC is in place.