Developer Andrew John March has launched a Kickstarter project to fund production of the WVR, an open-source embedded solution for audio that can play up to 18 channels of audio simultaneously.

It includes everything you need to get started with embedded audio, with no soldering, and no coding necessary.

WVR is a versatile device, capable of powering a new generation of embedded audio design, thanks in part to its WiFi and Bluetooth radio, providing the power of a versatile and extensible Graphical User Interface ( GUI ), without the need for a screen or other interface. Users can upload samples, manage firmware, set configurations, build sequences, or control any other data needed, wirelessly, using their laptop, or mobile device.

Features:

• Playback up to 18 stereo wav files simultaneously, with ~1ms latency
• Accepts virtually every audio file format, at any resolution, and any size, including wav, mp3, ogg, acc, flac, pcm, aiff, and many more
• Upload audio, map samples to MIDI notes, configure pin functionality, apply FX, manage files, etc, all over WIFI, with the default firmware that WVR ships with, and without writing any code
• Holds over 12 hours (8 GB) of stereo audio, at 16bit 44.1kHz resolution
• Can buffer over 1.5 minutes (16 MB) of stereo audio in RAM alone, at 16bit 44.1kHz resolution
• Optically isolated MIDI input, provides to-spec MIDI input implementation without any additional circuitry
• 14 GPIO pins, 8 of which can be analog inputs, and 4 of which can be capacitive touch inputs, plus the many peripherals available on the ESP32 .
• WVR’s Wifi can function either as a Station or Access Point (it can login to an existing wifi network, or can create its own network and accept connections directly from devices in range, without a router or local network of any kind)
• Write firmware in Arduino, and upload over wifi. Stores multiple firmwares onboard, selectable via the UI. Fully compatible with the extensive, and battle-tested ESP Arduino library, and the exceptionally powerful ESP-IDF framework.
• Use RC.js JavaScript framework to modify, or custom build, the User Interface that WVR serves to users, without prior knowledge of CSS, HTML, Babel, Node, etc. Even build and deploy native mobile apps for iOS or Android from the same code base. You can play with RC.js in this REPL, try modifying the existing code, to see how it’s intuitive, and highly portable, component-based syntax works, and check out the README.md file to learn more.
• Onboard Ultra Low Power (ULP) co-processor means WVR consumes only ~10uA in sleep mode

Pricing and Availability

The WVR is available to project backers for about $25.

Note: All Kickstarter projects can involve risk – see the project for details.