I am looking to have the ability to store/analyze audio using a Raspberry Pi Pico. I have found that electret microphones are a good option, since it only requires an ADC, which is already built-in to the Pico.
I am having trouble with finding resources for code/packages in Micropython and was wondering if this route is the way to go. I don't know much about this concept, but is there a package out there that can take the data captured from the ADC and turn it into something useable?
I've added one recently to a Pimoroni Galactic Unicorn which uses the Pi Pico W board. I've just written it up in Instructables: Adding a Microphone to Pi Pico W on Pimoroni Galactic Unicorn. That describes adding the SparkFun Sound Detector (essentially an amplified electret microphone) to the Pico on GPIO27. I'm working on a second article that describes the C++ code which continuously reads the ADC using DMA leaving it in two buffers where the program can then process the data.
In MicroPython you can't really get perfect audio from a microphone using simple ADC reads in a loop. You'd need to use the low-level stuff to use interrupts or DMA in the same style as C/C++ code to get jitter-free reads at a predictable, fixed rate. It may also be harder to write efficient code to process audio data in real-time in MicroPython although ulab library could be very helpful.
I've not used it but CircuitPython has analogbufio which is present on the RP2040 build for Pico. A hackspace article about this was covered by Adafruit Blog: Fast analogue input with Raspberry Pi Pico – HackSpace Magazine Issue 64.
My second article Instructables: Making a Guitar Tuner and Audio Spectrum Analyser Using the Pimoroni Galactic Unicorn
