 Where in the world is that part I need Digikey? The Great Search brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit every single week. Lady Adafruit uses her powers of engineering to help you. Yes, you find the things on digikey.com. Lady Adafruit, what is this week's great search? Okay, I'm glad you asked. So this week we did a little teardown of a dancing cactus friend. And we found an audio playback chip inside of it that does audio recording and playback. And it reminded me that when I was in school, it was very common to make projects. If you had projects that needed voice or audio clips or props. Nowadays, you know, you can use Circuit Python and you can maybe play audio through your teensy board or whatever. And you can do MP3 playback in Arduino. At the time, we didn't have chips like that. We had like 8-bit micros. And so what you did was you use an ISD audio chip. I was like, ah, you know, I should see if ISD audio chips are still around. And they are. And there's quite a lot of them on Digikey. And they have more options now. They have SPI control. They used to be only push button control. I thought I would show people these ISD audio chips. They're, you know, fairly inexpensive and they're very easy to integrate. So if you want to make a project that just has audio and you don't want to like deal with microcontrollers and coding and storage and files and stuff, they work really well. And you can even program the flash directly so that if you have like existing audio clips, you program them. So let's go to the Digikey website. Okay. So originally these were called ISD chips, but the word ISD is used like for a lot of different things. So I would call them like audio recording chips. And I think they were called like voice record and playback. So we'll actually look at the, the whole category. So this category under integrated circuits interface voice record and playback has a lot of options, but they're actually all again ISD chips. So, you know, the part number starts with ISD. And I think that they were from another company originally, which I think again was called ISD, but they were purchased by Nuvaton. I'm actually not 100% sure about that, but I'm pretty sure. And they're called the chip quarters. And again, these have been around since I was in school. So like it's been over, you know, 20 years. But they were, they're great. And again, originally designed, I think they were designed for, shoot, what's the word? It's answering machines, right? Which like nobody knows about anymore. But, you know, for those who are zoomers and younger, people would call you on the phone and then it would pick up the phone and it would say, hello, you reached, you know, Lady Aida's house, leave a message, beep, and then you would be able to record the clips of the message and then play them back when you got home. Originally these use tapes, which is a whole like thing where people would sell tapes with like cool voice greeting. But eventually they, right before they would have a business because everyone started having voicemail, they would have digital versions of answering machines. And I think these ISD chips were commonly used because some of these have like, you know, 30 seconds or 64 seconds, but some of them have like 64 minutes, which is a lot. So yeah, I think that this is like 64 minutes. That's like there's no greeting card, audio greeting card that has a 64 minute like epic poem that you have to say. I think that's, I think that would be used for message storage and keeping. So that said, there's a couple different options of these. One thing that I do like is, well, let's go look at only the ones that are in stock. They're actively available and they're normally in stock, which is not, which is not done. There's like 500, but many of them are discontinued. So what's neat is there's a couple new things. So first off, you know, just so you know the sampling frequency is not that great, you know, they tend to go up to 12 kilohertz. They're really meant for voice. They're meant for that narrow band. Voices tend to be about two to eight kilohertz. So you're not going to get musical good musical quality. They're also compressed. And from what I recall, it's not stored as in like true RAM. I think it's stored on like, like floating capacitive plates. Like it's a little bit like dynamic RAM, but it, but like it's lossy anyways. Just, it's not the high quality and it's compressed and everything, but they do have things like built in speaker output, built in microphone input. So, you know, we can look at, let's look at one that has a microphone input so you can record the microphone easily. Some of them have I2S now, which they absolutely didn't have before. So let's do that. There's one that has I2C, which I thought was neat. I'll just show that really quickly. Again, this version is new. It's a 28 dip. So it's a little pricey, but you know, if you don't want to even make a PCB, you can wire this up on a breadboard and just connect it up. It's got speaker output. It's got line output and it's got I2C control microphone input, you know, they kind of just do everything on their own. And then they have buttons that you can use to control. You can like record into each like memory slot and then have it play back. But let's not look at the interface because I2C, although it's cool, is most people I think would use the push buttons and stuff. And then it'll just, you know, so by price and look at some of the options. You know, you're going to pay a little bit more for the more space that they've got. I do like the SOIC versions of these. I think, yeah. So the ISD1 series means it can play one channel, but they do have a version. They do have versions of these. They're more expensive, but they do multiple channels. So let me scroll down. So I think like the ISD3, which maybe I'd search for separately. Oh, you know what I should search for within? Yeah, so ISD3. Or is it the ISD2? It could be that they were not. Oh, you know, they don't have the microscope or the microphone input. Yeah, the ISD2. So you have to program with SPI. It doesn't have a built-in microphone. But these are neat because they can do multiple channels at a time. Yeah, three channel concurrent playback. And if you're 65 watts, so you can actually have like multiple sound effects playing at the same time. So again, something that would be hard to do with a microcontroller. You can do it, but like this kind of does it all for you. So other than that, the microphone one, I recommend if you're going to start with these, get the microphone one. This is kind of cool. You just plug the microphone right in and you can record immediately. So microphone input. And then I liked the SOIC. Oh, there's a DIP version. This could be a little bit more expensive because they're, they're rarer. But you can get this DIP version. I would get this, you know, the ISD1740py. Totally cool. Has 80 seconds of memory. And then of course they go up to, you know, more 17 minutes. I don't know, like a full album basically. But the other package I recommend, you know, if you don't mind doing a little soldering, it's less expensive is get the SOIC. You can get little breakout boards. And I think the ISD1610. That's a good option. 20 seconds so you can do little sound effects, record and playback. Let's look at the data sheet real fast. Whoa. This is not the data sheet. This is all the different options. That's got a goal. But that's not what I wanted. I guess this shows all the comparisons. So this is ISD, AIU enabler, ISD1. Chip quarter family. Okay. So this shows you all the different options. Oh, some of them have external flash. So you put flash chip on there much like it looks like this dancing cactus might do. This isn't actually the data sheet. This was the spec sheet. But let me see that. This is the audio selection guide. One moment. Let me look up. Maybe this one has a data sheet. Now it doesn't. Okay. We'll have to maybe this one. Okay. Yeah. This series. So you can look up the data sheet by googling it through the new botan site. But there you go. Microphone input. And then buttons. So, you know, the buttons are, you know, playback and record. And you can, you know, like press a button to hold. And you press like one of the IO and you can record into that slot. So you can have like six different looks like nine different slots in each one. You can record into the slot kind of as much as you want. And then play back. And it just records and plays back. And then just to be clear. When you turn off the power, the memory is still there's non-volatile memory. It's not SRAM. It's not quite flash. It's not DRAM or SRAM. It's kind of like somewhere in the middle and lasts a long time. But it's, I think it's slightly lossy. And then it looks like the whole family, each one has slightly different pinout. But SOIC is pretty easy to use. You can break up board if you want to get on a breadboard. I've made dozens and dozens of projects with these. It was my go-to because, again, at the time we had only 8-bit microcontrollers. And you wanted to add audio. This was like the easiest way to do it. Just why Circuit Python playing audio was really important to me because I loved making projects that had reactive audio. Especially like, you know, capacitive touch. And then it played something and the device would speak to you. Very common interactive art. So you want to get started checking out the Chip Quarter series. I would get the ISD 1610. And you'd want to start with. But check out, I mean, there's, again, dozens and dozens of them in the family, including dip ones, if you want to go straight to a breadboard. That's a great search.