Subj : Play audio from a serial port
To   : Bob Worm
From : AKAcastor
Date : Thu May 09 2024 11:06:48

 BW> That's a good question. I suppose the instantaneous 
 BW> pulse would be 57.6 kHz but an alternative way to look 
 BW> at it would be as a 11.5 kHz signal with a really wonky 
 BW> 9:1 duty cycle... I further suppose since it's a 
 BW> "square" wave the instantaneous frequency could be 
 BW> considered to be infinity (obviously not really).

Being a square wave definitely makes the frequency measurement less intuitive! (and far beyond my analog comprehension)  After I sent the last message, I thought about how hilariously over-simplified my intuitions on analog frequencies are.  Usually everything is digitized by the time it makes it onto my plate.

 BW> There were a good number of consumer and homebrew 
 BW> projects for doing this with the parallel port. In 
 BW> theory a nice clean 8 bit output, I made one with my 
 BW> school friend back in the day and it sounded *awful*. I 
 BW> suspect our quality control was not good enough as 
 BW> other people reported good results.

It could also be especially hard to compare reported results if some peoples standard for good results were different.  :)  But with results being awful that does suggest the quality control may have been suspect. ;)

 BW> Oh for the days when you could just walk into Maplin 
 BW> and buy qty. 1 components... In fact we just turned up 
 BW> with a list of "0.1uF electrolytic" etc and handed it 
 BW> to the poor guy behind the counter to rummage through 
 BW> the catalogue and find the 20 or so part codes we 
 BW> needed for us and then fetch them from the back!

I still like to order very small quantities from Digikey, I assume if any of the orders aren't being filled by robots then the people working there are probably judging me for wasting their time packaging 83 cents worth of resistors.  (and I still end up with spare parts left over!)


Chris/akacastor

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 * Origin: Another Millennium - Canada - another.tel (21:1/162)

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