PicoMite: driving a passive buzzer

Author	Message
thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United Kingdom Posts: 4388	Posted: 10:28am 16 Dec 2022       Hi @Volhout, Thank you (and Bill and others) for continuing to take an interest.   Volhout said   For computer games sounds (at least the vintage games) distortion is not really an issue (it even gives a charme to the game) so you can drive the speakers really hard. You have correctly identified the use-case.   Volhout said   I have no datasheet on the speaker you use, but if it is the same 16 ohm BUZZER discussed earlier, you would need to change the 47 to 33 or even 22 ohm (which will impact battery life seriously) to drive it to the optimum. But still, you would not get into distortion. I have upgraded and have a choice of two small 8R speakers:   - https://bitsboxuk.com/data/sensors/st059.pdf   - https://bitsboxuk.com/data/sensors/st060.pdf At the moment I am driving from the PicoMite VSYS (which when on battery is being fed by a 2500mAh, 3.7V LiPo through a 1N5818 schottky diode).   Volhou said   P.S. if you know you are going to have a small speaker, low frequencies are typically not output well, you may also gain a bit by making the game sounds higher frequency. Just tune the whole melody 1 octave up. Thanks, I will play with that, and also with the 33/47R resistor (I can try a couple of 68R in parallel) and also see what volume I have having the PicoMite PLAY SOUND work at, it may not be the maximum. Best wishes, Tom