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DfPlayer Mini is a well-known DFRobot board for adding sound to maker projects. At a very low price it provides an audio player, microSD card reader, a 3-watt amplifier, and control from microcontrollers, or it can work as a standalone player using buttons.Ā
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But there is another, less popular and very convenient option called Voice Prompter. Like the DFPlayer Mini, the Voice Prompter plays audio files, but it has two major advantages:
It includes a built-in speaker and 16 MB of internal storage.
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To load MP3 files onto the Voice Prompter you connect the included USB cable and copy the audio files as if it were a USB flash drive. Once the files are copied, you connect it to an Arduino through UART by crossing the TX and RX wires.
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Voice Prompter is ideal for adding voices and sounds to small devices and toys. The only reason it never became popular may be that DFRobot never released the library (broken link: https://github.com/cdjq/DFRobot_SerialMP3), so documentation and real projects are scarce.Ā
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I wrote an Arduino library with a usage example, available on GitHub: https://github.com/ronibandini/DFR1173-Voice-Prompter
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Another interesting feature is the Busy pin. By reading this pin you can detect when audio playback has finished and synchronize actions in your device.
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Overall, the Voice Prompter is convenient due to its simplicity, costāno need for a microSD card or external speakerāand compact size.
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DFPlayer Mini and DFPlayer Pro are still better choices when you need to amplify the audio signal.
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Links
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Arduino Library DFR1173Ā (or search from the Arduino IDE the library for IDE DFR1173)
