The Monk Makes Amplified Speaker Kit for Raspberry Pi is a great way of attaching a small amplified speaker to a Raspberry Pi. The kit includes everything you need to give your Raspberry Pi a voice!
The Amplified Speaker board is an easy to use amplified speaker on a PCB. The board needs a 5V power supply that can be provided by a Raspberry Pi. Audio input will normally be to the 3.5mm stereo audio jack socket, which is mixed to a mono signal as there is just a single speaker on the board.
The board is based on the PAM8302 digital amplifier IC.
Package Contents
The kit includes:
1x MonkMakes Amplified Speaker
10x female to female header wires to power the Amplified Speaker (only 2 needed)
1x A short stereo audio lead
1x Raspberry Leaf GPIO template
Raspberry Pi not included.
Getting Started
Fit the Raspberry Leaf GPIO template over the GPIO pins of your Raspberry Pi (Make sure you get it the right way around (see the picture above).
Use the red female to female header lead to connect one of the pins labelled 5V (it doesn’t matter which) on the Raspberry Pi to the 5V pin of the Amplified Speaker.
Use the black female to female header lead to connect one of the pins labelled GND (it doesn’t matter which) on the Raspberry Pi to the GND pin of the Amplified Speaker.
Use the audio lead to connect the Raspberry Pi’s audio socket to the socket on the Amplified Speaker board. Note that its a good idea to do this before you power up the Raspberry Pi, otherwise it can cause the Raspberry Pi to reboot.
Power up your Raspberry Pi
Open a Terminal session on the Raspberry Pi and run the following commands to download an audio file and then play it: wget https://monkmakes.com/downloads/monkmakes.mp3 omxplayer -o local monkmakes.mp3