ANAVI's Dev Mic Is a Raspberry Pi RP2040-Powered Customizable Microphone for Machine Learning Work

UPDATE (8/14/2024): ANAVI has opened crowdfunding for the Dev Mic, its open-hardware omnidirectional USB microphone powered by the Seeed Studio XIAO RP2040.

The company has priced the kit, which includes the microphone board with pre-installed Raspberry Pi RP2040-based Seeed Studio XIAO RP2040 microcontroller board, protective acrylic enclosure, and all fixing screws — but no USB cable for the device's USB Type-C connector — at $25, with free shipping the US and $12 shipping internationally.

The crowdfunding campaign runs through to 26 September on Crowd Supply, with hardware expected to ship to backers in mid-November.

Original article continues below.

Bulgarian open hardware specialist ANAVI is preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign for a gadget designed to make audio machine learning experimentation easier: the Dev Mic, powered by a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller connected to an STMicroelectronics MP23DB01HP omnidirectional microphone.

"[The] ANAVI Dev Mic is a compact, affordable, exceptionally adaptable open source microphone designed with machine learning in mind," the company writes of its latest creation. "At its core are the Seeed Studio XIAO RP2040 module and an omnidirectional digital microphone that work together to ensure high-quality sound capture and processing."

At its most basic, the ANAVI Dev Mic is exactly what it sounds like: a digital microphone, based on Micro Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) technology. There's a USB Type-C connection at one side of the board, and it can be connected to a host PC for use as a USB microphone — but that's only part of the story.

"You can flash your own firmware to customize Dev Mic for specific applications," ANAVI explains, "or use its I/O [Input/Output] pins to expand its functionality by attaching additional components such as LED indicators, a mute switch, and other buttons." There are nine general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins exposed on the PCB, with unpopulated breadboard-friendly headers for ease of expansion.

As with ANAVI's earlier hardware designs, the Dev Mic is being released as open hardware: the hardware's KiCad project is available on GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, along with the design files for a laser-cut acrylic enclosure; the firmware, meanwhile, is based on Arm's Microphone Library for the Raspberry Pi Pico and made available on a separate repository under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.

ANAVI is planning to fund production of the Dev Mic via a Crowd Supply campaign, with interested parties invited to sign up to be notified when it goes live.