July 9, 2012
A fun filled day spent navigating the VLSI web site, figuring out how to use VSIDE (which is apparently also the name of a horrible, horrible video game), digging on DigiKey, and last but not least, finding those useful pins that SPARKFUN always somehow manages to leave floating and putting them to good use.  In short: Today, we uploaded custom firmware to the VS1053B(which by the way can read straight off the SD card without ANY help from an Arduino). This is all well and good, but there’s also the VS1000, which can read and write NAND flash, function as a USB host, AND play Ogg files all in one chip with built in voltage regulators. Can you say shrinking BOM? 

A fun filled day spent navigating the VLSI web site, figuring out how to use VSIDE (which is apparently also the name of a horrible, horrible video game), digging on DigiKey, and last but not least, finding those useful pins that SPARKFUN always somehow manages to leave floating and putting them to good use. 

In short: Today, we uploaded custom firmware to the VS1053B(which by the way can read straight off the SD card without ANY help from an Arduino). This is all well and good, but there’s also the VS1000, which can read and write NAND flash, function as a USB host, AND play Ogg files all in one chip with built in voltage regulators. Can you say shrinking BOM?