I didn’t mean to use pi sound as is ofc - the board is too large indeed. But it has all the functionality and IOs I wish to have for uConsole, 2x2 would be ideal, hence I thought we could adapt some of its parts for the expansion board.
USB midi just works
Does it mean I can send midi directly to usb and in case of right drivers it will be properly recognised without the need of additional hardware chips?
Ok, got it. I mentioned a couple of others and will get back when I’ve done some testing.
What I meant is that plugging in, for instance, a usb midi device on the A connector, the uconsole does usb host midi with no special setup (tested with supercollider and LMMS). I tested an AKAI LPK and korg nanoKontroll and a QuNeo. It’d be neat to build a variant of the uPico with mini-midi, perhaps. EDIT: I mean, Midi type A to 3.5 TRS jacks.
The minimal board types I mentioned above (not the injectors) can be had for 13 Euros from China. They’re all knock-offs of GitHub - waveshare/WM8960-Audio-HAT: The drivers of [WM8960 Audio HAT] for Raspberry Pi I’m not sure I can get it to build on the Rockchip (I have an A-06) but I’ll give it a shot.
Good stuff, keep us updated 
Do you think the recording quality will be at a decent level with this board?
Better than the waveshare which has 1. audio amps and speaker connections, 2. two mics https://www.berrybase.de/detail/index/sArticle/6985 /Buy a Raspberry Pi Codec Zero – Raspberry Pi which has better support and less foo. stereo in/out It’s also a card that the raspi foundation suggests and will support making until at least 2028 I’ve ordered one of those AND have have a WM8960 based card from digispark that I found in a box. codec zero first.
So, the Pi Codec Zero board is also too large. I’ve been fishing through the upico schematics and it looks like the SCL & SDA are on the minipcie at pins 50 & 52. That’ll get me I2C for a number of boards (WM8960 for instance). I’m just not sure how the pads on the basic expansion board are laid out. I’m going to ask someone in another thread with more clue 
It would be really nice if Clockwork published the PCB sources for the EXT board… I have a lot of ideas, but I would be manually positioning the speaker pins, measuring the Mini PCIe card-edge connector, etc.
outline drawing is not CAD file, so you still need do some work on your own
(or using dotcypress’s upico board design for outline and screw hole position.
So I dug into circuits for this chip since there a number of designs out there and it would certainly be easily doable to get 3.5 mm stereo in/out and on the board. I just don’t have the time to design and produce the boards. Sigh. I had looked at shoehorning a sparkfun board I have into the uconsole, but that’s not practical even though you could piggy back on the pads of the 4G unpopulated card. For the curious, it’s the card covered here: Audio Codec Breakout - WM8960 Hookup Guide - SparkFun Learn. The direct link to hardware (eagle) files https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/2/e/9/5/c/Stereo_Audio_Codec_Breakout_WM8960_v10.zip or: SparkFun_Audio_Codec_Breakout_WM8960/Hardware at main · sparkfun/SparkFun_Audio_Codec_Breakout_WM8960 · GitHub
Adding trs jacks for midi would also, just barely fit.
I’m just swamped by other project and software work.
Thanks for digging into the topic! I can imagine it needs quite some time to invest into but hopefully someone else will be willing to make a uConsole DAC happen.
Looking at the pi-hat version… the header seems to use alot… Don’t know anything about it… but a functioning gpio example is probably a good start right? a microcontroller may be needed to consolidate all those control pins…
