The Texas Instruments PCM4222 Evaluation Board

I had been looking for a good ADC board for lab use as a measurement device.

At first I considered making my own, using something like the TI PCM4222 ADC chip, due to its excellent performance, good availability and relative ease of build.

But then I got lazy and purchased the PCM4222 EVM instead:

PCM4222EVM top

It is a 4-layer, well designed and implemented board.

Besides the necessary 2 clocks, it has a full set of digital outputs:
– Dual AES3 compatible outputs (both coaxial at 75Ω and XLR at 110Ω)
– I2S
– DSD
– Raw, directly from the modulators

Its analog inputs are balanced and very low noise.

Make no mistake, this is an evaluation module. As such, there are no mounting holes. Just four rubber “feet”:

PCM4222EVM bottom

Since I was in a hurry to get it to work, I set it up for operation with the least amount of power supplies (+/-15VDC and +5VDC) and set the DIP switches for I2S operation at 24bit and 96KHz.

I wanted to use one of its built-in AES3 outputs, but my sound card only had consumer level s/pdif inputs. After a short Google search, this came up: http://www.rane.com/note149.html

In other words, I had to make a 75Ω cable, with an XLR at one end, an RCA plug at the other and this circuit embedded in the XLR plug:

AES3_to_SPDIF

Surprisingly enough, it fit.

IMG_9400_resize

I hooked it up to the ‘scope to see if everything looked OK, and after being satisfied with what I saw I hooked it up to my X-Meridian’s coax s/pdif input. The sound mixer in Windows showed a full level signal coming out of it but it was heavily distorted. What was going on?

While troubleshooting, I tried the serial output port by connecting it to a WM8804 board that I had lying around. Sure enough, I got proper undistorted s/pdif output, so the PCM4222 was working as it should. So the problem had to be in the AES3 drivers.

After some more Googling I came across a post in some forum by someone who had a similar problem with me. He said that for some reason he had to set the ADC’s output to Left Justified (instead of I2S) in order to get the AES3 transmitters to output a proper signal. I made the necessary changes to the microswitches and lo and behold, it worked!

This is the configuration that I ended up with:

config_2496_LJ_2

config_2496_LJ_1

config_2496_LJ_3

Next up is a proper input stage, since the ADC has balanced inputs but most of my equipment-under-test is single ended.

Arduino: ENC28J60 LAN module

I bought this inexpensive (something like $3 delivered) Ethernet module a few years ago, only to discover that there really wasn’t a decent library to support it. So it got tossed into a drawer..ENC28J60%20Ethernet%20Module1[1]A few days ago I realized that I needed a low cost Ethernet interface for one of my projects. It wouldn’t really need to do much, so I thought the ENC28J60 would probably be able to handle the task.

Doing the customary Google search for Arduino support turned out a full Ethernet library for it! 🙂

It’s called UIPEthernet and it is fully compatible with the original Ethernet library for the Arduino. What this means is that every piece of code written for the Ethernet library (in other words for the “classic” Arduino Ethernet Shield) can be made to work with a dirt-cheap ENC28J60 just by changing
#include <Ethernet.h>
to
#include <UIPEthernet.h>

This I had to see for myself, so I hooked it up.

The module that I have needs 3.3V power (not 5V!!) but its SPI pins are 5V tolerant so it will pair nicely with any Arduino.
The necessary hookup for the UNO, MEGA or DUE can be found in the library’s page: https://github.com/jcw/ethercard

I decided to try a classic Ethernet example sketch: The WebServer sketch. This one reads a few analog inputs on the Arduino and then serves them on a web page.

Sure enough, all I had to do to get it to work was just change the #include statement. It worked like a charm!

WebServer running

So, there you have it. You can add full wired Ethernet connectivity to your Arduino for less than $3.