We were thinking of soldering a speaker onto one of the blinks so that it can output sound, but we can’t tell if that is possible. Is there a pinout diagram for the board so that we can see what can be accessed/modified?
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You could potentially use the pins on the SP debug header for this…
| Label | Standard function | Hardware accessible as |
|---|---|---|
| G | Ground | |
| R | RX | PD1 |
| T | TX | PD0 |
| A | Aux | PE2 |
(Note that the R and T are reversed and the A is not connected on the most recent silicone-topped blinks).
If you are just playing around at a low level, then you can directly access these to drive the speaker, maybe from a timer interrupt.
If you want the speaker to work from inside a normal blinks game using the blinkBIOS then you will have to be more creative since the blinkBIOS uses all three hardware timers for things like refreshing the pixels and driving the IR communications.
One fun way to do it might be to attach the speaker to the TX pin and then set up the serial port to drive that pin. You could then control the output that the speaker saw by writing data to the serial port and by changing the baud rate. This way you would not need very accurate timing since the serial port runs off of its own clock.
Let us know how you make out or if any questions come up!
-josh
Also, here is the schematic…
…but again note that on the SP connector on the latest batch of units with the silicone cover that the A pin is not connected and the RX and TX pins are swapped.