MSGEQ7 - Thought I’d split some discussion of this to its own thread.
I think I got mine to work, I was using a sparkfun microphone breakout but I think its almost too sensitive. I have it working when on a 3.3V power… but it peaks way to fast for my use.
@Jon_Burroughs I typically get your readings 70-100 range with all connections but with the audio in disconnected, and anywhere from 250-600 range for quiet and peak easily to 1023 if i yell.
my mic has a preamp though.
Sounds like the preamp level is a bit high. Try to adjust it to get readings arround 100 for quiet.
Curious to see how this discussion goes… MSGEQ7 is coming up on my list of things to play with.
My microphone breakout doesnt have any way to adjust the preamp.
I may look to upgrade to this one:
Is anyone else using microphone input? I think more are using a direct source (1/8/audio jack).
I’ve used a mic input on one… Ended up covering the mic with hot glue so it could adequately deal with 100+ dB. That and a bunch of exponential moving average stuff to detect current min and max
PS I’ve since scrapped the hardware and just use FFT.
Am I thinking too simple when I ask, why not just solder a voltage divider togeter to reduce the level?
All the cheap mics (I had my hands on) are basically crap, because they don´t detect / run quickly into “saturation” at the interesting 63 and 160 Hz bands…
Try something like this perhaps?
http://www.openmusiclabs.com/projects/bootlegmic/bootlegmic-assembly/
Or just 2 resistors - a voltage divider between the preamp and the MSGEQ7.
By that you could even correct (have it closer to “linear”) the frequency response of your mic if you have a noise generator+spectrum analyzer or a sine generator+oscilloscope by hand. Instead of the generator a CD works fine, too.
It turns out, my MSGEQ7 chip is faulty. I have since ditched the little bastard and am turing towards FFT with the Teensy3.1 and the Audio Shield for it. My audio input is a MAX9814 Auto Gain Control from Adafruit, and I like the little guy. The teensy doesn’t even flinch at 256 bins of EQ sampling.
The schematic provided in the new datasheet is slightly different than the previous pdf version, so I’m gonna try it out and see if I can get my last chip to work: http://www.mix-sig.com/datasheets/MSGEQ7.pdf
Don’t you have a half dozen LED strips to play with?