Wednesday, July 01, 2026

Mems microphone to USB Audio


A PDM (Pulse Density Microphone) and a Raspberry Pi Pico. It appears on the computer as an audio input (I changed the name from the original).



All credit for this project to Sandeep Mistry here

A recording of how it sounds (pretty good) is here. There's a bit of mic popping - perhaps a pop filter would help.

Applications of this technology are swirling in my mind...

2 comments:

Paul vk3hn said...

I have sampled the audio modulated signal from a MAX9814 compressor (varies around 2V) using a ADC (analog GPIO) on a XIAO ESP32-C3 (could be any number of MCUs). I then used this 0..4095 value to modulate a 60kHz PWM signal on another GPIO. How would the PEMS microphone improve on this?

Peter Marks said...

I'm not sure that it would be any better. I briefly fantasised that the output of the microphone could be used to directly generate a PWM signal for AM transmission.