We love open source hardware and software because of the collaborations that make ultra-rapid development of niche stuff like this possible. You can follow along with the development of the Teensy’s S/PDIF capabilities on the PJRC forum. Of course, you don’t have to know anything about any of that to simply use S/PDIF with the Teensy Audio Library. The advantage of this over any voltage-level signals (like with regular wires) is that the source and destination devices aren’t electrically connected at all, which gets rid of the dreaded ground loop hum and any RF interference.Īn S/PDIF audio data stream is a bit complex, but if you’re interested has a fantastic dissection of it up on her blog.

S/PDIF, and more specifically optical TOSLINK, uses LED light sent down an optical fiber to encode audio data. And now, with just the addition of a highfalutin LED and some software, the Teensy can output digital audio over optical fiber. And lately, has been building out the Audio Library for this platform, making it even more appealing to the synth / audio geeks among us. With Arduino library support on an ARM Cortex M4 processor, it’s no surprise that we’re fans of the Teensy 3.1.

Teensy wire library