The MediaTek MT7986 (Filogic 830) SoC of the BananaPi BPi-R3 comes with a built-in audio engine, and the board allows connecting audio codecs via the 26-pin GPIO header.
Patches adding support for using the Wolfson WM8960 with the audio engine of the MT7986 have recently been added to upstream Linux (v6.6/v6.7).
A cheap and easily available WM8960 module is the ReSpeaker 2-mic hat from Seeedstudio:
Thatās cool, thanks!
Seems like the new mt7988 also has the same audio engine and itās also register-compatible (I havenāt checked all), should be easy to add support as well.
Yes, thatās true. Both MT7981 and MT7988 seem to have similar audio units, probably only minor details (such as clocks needing to be taken care of) will vary.
I guess they use a common design with their general purpose SOCs, since adding audio interface to a router-oriented SOC doesnāt make sense. Or maybe Iām missing something
You may have missed that classic 2-wire analog telephony interfaces are also connected in that way, eg. Si305x PROSLIC is what you typically see being connected to the digital audio signals of such a SoC āin the wildā.
Also the use of such SoCs in (audio-driven) home assistant devices or smart speakers is thinkable, though not likely as most of the chips nowadays for that got at least DSP features, if not even NPU for wake-word recognition and such (MT798x got none of that).
Also pro-audio application seems unlikely due to missing IEEE 1588 Version 2 support which would be needed for DANTE.
It makes sense now that you mentioned that telephony interface. I think those CPU cores (even the A53) are powerful enough for some DSP algorithms like word-recognition, having SIMD instructions helps. But Idk if itās a common thing to do on linux
