Now that you have played around with your HUZZAH Feather, you are going to want to get acquainted with the star of the show, the MusicMaker FeatherWing:

Bend all audio files to your will with the Adafruit Music Maker FeatherWing + Amplifier! It's a fun-size version of our Music Maker shield for Arduino, and similar to our other Music Maker FeatherWing, but this one is even better - with an on-board 3 Watt amplifier! This powerful wing features the VS1053, an encoding/decoding (codec) chip that can decode a wide variety of audio formats such as MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, MIDI, FLAC, WAV (PCM and ADPCM). You can do all sorts of stuff with the audio as well such as adjusting bass, treble, and volume digitally.

All this functionality is implemented in a light-weight SPI interface so that any Feather Board can play audio from an SD card. There's also a special MIDI mode that you can boot the chip into that will read 'classic' 31250Kbaud MIDI data from the UART TX pin and act like a synth/drum machine - there are dozens of built-in drum and sample effects!

What a great musical add-on to your Feather! That's why we spun up this super FeatherWing, perfect for use with any of our Feather Boards! Music playback testing working with ATmega32u4, ATSAMD M0, ESP8266, WICED Teensy 3, and nRF52 Feathers. MIDI playback works with all Feathers but you may need to remove the 'Wing during programming and also for USB-Serial Feathers like the ESP8266 and nRF52 you'll end up re-using the main Serial console for MIDI which can be confusing.

Here are some specs:

  • Features the VS1053B codec chip - decodes Ogg Vorbis, MP3/MP2/MP1, MP4, AAC, WMA, FLAC, WAV/PCM, MIDI
  • Stereo audio out to any 4ohm speakers (3W max) or 8 ohm speakers (1W max), class D output
  • MicroSD card socket, for any FAT16/FAT32 formatted SD card from 64MB or greater
  • Built in MIDI synth/drum machine with dozens of instruments

Start by heading over to the MusicMaker FeatherWing guide to learn how to get your MusicMaker FeatherWing to play music and make noises.

This guide was first published on Jun 21, 2017. It was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

This page (The MusicMaker FeatherWing) was last updated on Jun 14, 2017.

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