Time flies when you’re having fun. Or are just too busy with things, in general. It’s been two and a half years since I posted about my Dual Mono AK4490 DAC. That DAC has been built and is in use by at least 6 people, other than myself. All of them have been very satisfied with its performance. But since then quite some water has passed under the bridge. Among other things, the AK4493 chip came out, and it was just that much different than the AK4490 that I had to update my design to accommodate it. Feature-wise it was pretty enticing. It looked more like a limited performance version of the A ..read more

Over 6.500 lines of code, completely re-written from scratch, it supports the ES9038Pro and ES9028Pro DAC chips. Now supports both 3.2″ (legacy) and SainSmart 4.3″ TFTs. Get all the juicy details: http://www.dimdim.gr/arduino/tft-hifiduino-pro-project ..read more

This post serves mainly as a placeholder for the build guide that I wrote for the PCBs, since it seems that some people had problems with the download link that I provided. The build guide can be downloaded by clicking here: ArDAM Lite Build Guide (9340 downloads) I do have a few left over PCBs, if you’re interested contact me for more info ..read more

I love Arduinos as much as the next (nerdy) guy, but let’s face it, they are no powerhouses (DUE and ZERO excluded, but they discontinued the former.. go figure..). The Atmel AVR series is 8-bit and its clock is ridiculously slow by today’s standards. Sure, you can get it to do some things with impressive speed if you are willing to do some low-level programming but I myself do this as a hobby and thus don’t really want to deal with assembly-level code. If only there was a fast and cheap microcontroller that was easy to program.. Enter the ST STM32F103C family of microcontrollers. These litt ..read more

These days I’m co-developing an AK4490 based DAC. The aim is to end up with a no-compromise dual mono design, one that would perform at the very least on par with my Buffalo III. Of course, to do that one has to run the 4490s in software mode. As a matter of fact, it is generally preferred to run a 4490 in software versus hardware mode, for several reasons. To begin with, in software mode the 4490 supports DSD decoding. It goes as far as to support a “Volume Bypass” feature which bypasses most of the processing done on the DSD signal (a.k.a. “the ΔΣ modulator”), resulting in more pure sound. B ..read more

A new page is up: http://www.dimdim.gr/diyaudio/la-skala-attenuator/ It is my take on a stepped ladder attenuator, controlled by an Arduino ..read more

Since there has been a lot of interest in my Isolator shield these past few months, I have been optimizing its design. The result of this optimization is this PCB: It’s called “the Rev. 1.2”. Nothing major has changed. The pinouts are still the same, the major components are the same, the functionality is essentially the same. The changes are as follows: New SPI header. It just passes through the SPI signals, nothing more. It does not connect to anything on the board. New SPI_CS header. Useful only if / when connecting SPI peripherals. Reset button. Because you never know.. New circuitry for ..read more

My Universal Signal Isolator shield now has its own page, complete with the board’s schematic and PCB. I have tried to document the shield as best I could but feel free to comment if you see something that is not clear or is missing ..read more

Time flies when you’re having fun. Or are just too busy with things, in general. It’s been two and a half years since I posted about my Dual Mono AK4490 DAC. That DAC has been built and is in use by at least 6 people, other than myself. All of them have been very satisfied with its performance. But since then quite some water has passed under the bridge. Among other things, the AK4493 chip came out, and it was just that much different than the AK4490 that I had to update my design to accommodate it. Feature-wise it was pretty enticing. It looked more like a limited performance version of the A ..read more