PineSound is a development board for earbuds and digital audio players

You may have read Pine64’s April’s Fools spoof about the PineBuds and PinePod earlier this month. It turns out those will be real, and the Pine64 PineSound development board will be used to bring the PineBuds earbuds and PinePod digital audio player to market.

The PineSound board features Bestechnic BES2300 Bluetooth 5.0 audio chip, two coaxial & optical input and output, a 3.5mm headphone jack, 4.4mm and 2.5mm balanced jacks, an SMA connector, a USB Type-C connector, plus interfaces for a touchscreen display.

PineSound development board

PineSound preliminary specifications:

  • WiSoC – Bestechnic BES2300-YP dual-core Arm Cortex-M4F @ up to 300 MHz with HW DSP instruction, 992KB SRAM, 4MB flash, Bluetooth 5.0 dual mode. Supports hybrid ANC (active noise cancellation) and TWS (true wireless stereo). Note: the datasheet has been made available in the comments section.
  • Display – LCD (should be SPI) and touch panel connectors
  • Audio
    • Coaxial & optical input (left)
    • Coaxial & optical output (right)
    • 3.5mm headphone jack
    • 4.4mm and 2.5mm balanced jacks
    • 40-pin audio header for up to 5 microphones, stereo speakers
  • USB – 1x USB Type-C port
  • Expansion – 40-pin PI-2 GPIO expansion header
  • Misc – Volume, Reset, and Power buttons, SMA connector
BES2300-YP Block Diagram
BES2300-YP block diagram

I was unable to find any public SDK, but Pine64 should soon release one, and Ben (Ralim) had the chance to play with the development board and the SDK, and here’s what he said about it:

[T]here are some binary blobs in the firmware around Bluetooth [and] some for voice assistants (but I don’t know if we would ship them). But it was in a compilable and runnable state with fairly complete hardware drivers. I see it a bit like the bl602, where we have a working SDK with some blobs, but the hardware is very good for hacking on. The main MCU so far is quite powerful and battery efficient. Flashing is easy over a UART serial port [too].

Ultimately the goal is to provide audio products like the PineBuds pictured below.

PineBuds

The PineBuds wireless Bluetooth earbuds will come with six microphones in total, 3 on each bug, and a touch-based input located on the side. They’ll support ambient and environment noise cancellation, offer long battery life, and could also be used as hearing aids. The cradle will be used to house and charge the earbuds but has also been designed to ease firmware flashing with a built-in UART. It’s too early to talk about pricing since the PineBuds will not be available for several, but for reference, consumer TWS earbuds based on Bestechnic BES2300 are selling for around $75.

BES2300 earbud board

Another important point is that PineSound, PineBuds, and PinePod are community projects, and their success and pace of development will entirely depend on the interest of the developer community. Other such projects were the PineTime smartwatch and Pinecil soldering iron which were very successful, as well as the PineCube open-source camera which, as Pine64 reckons, has been a failure. So we’ll have to see how it goes. The next step is the launch of the PineSound development board which should take place in the next few months.

PineSound with Display
PineSound fitted with PineTime display

As a side note, Pine64 will soon launch pre-orders for QuartzPro64 SBC powered by Rockchip RK3588 SoC, and the board will be subsidized, so that qualified developers can purchase it for $150 despite the ~$300 BoM cost. You can register your interest on Pine64 website.

Via Pine64’s April 2022 update.

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8 Comments
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Philipp Blum
2 years ago

Damn, they really deliver. Let’s see how the whole toolchain etc. will look like. I am not really interested in Audio stuff though.

2 years ago

Wow, that’s a weirdly clocked RAM, but it should be said that it’s capacity is equally-weird 830KB + 64KB for Bluetooth subsystem.

2 years ago

This is a much better chip: dual 300MHz M4F with 992+64KB RAM,4MB flash and better analog, you are welcome.
https://airreps.info/files/datasheets/BES2300-YP_Datasheet_v0.26.pdf

Amazed
Amazed
2 years ago

I am interested in this board. U fortunately my previous experience with pine is quite bad…
Where are Ralim’s comments taken from? I kinda would like to contact him…

Theguyuk
Theguyuk
2 years ago

CNX did you ever get your Rock pi 3 working, iirc you could not boot

Boardcon Rockchip and Allwinner SoM and SBC products