WM8960 Audio Module Hi-Fi Sound Card HAT for Raspberry Pi 4B+ 4B 3B+ 3B 2B+ Zero W WH 2W Stereo CODEC Play/Record

Took a little research to figure out how to get it working - google waveshare wm8960 and you'll find a Wiki with step by step instructions. One star off for no mention of drivers, support link, or instructions in the product listing nor included in/on the product packaging. It's not plug-n-play. BTW, this is Waveshare and comes in a Waveshare box.Those Wiki instructions will have you clone a git repo then run the included shell script. Word of caution- that script does a lot. Since I'm not the most trusting of running random scripts with admin privileges, I created a RaspberryPi OS image on a fresh SD card for the 'experimenting'. Did not study every single thing it installed or modified, but again, it was a lot. At the end of all that, it did work perfectly and created a new sound device that can be selected from the speaker icon in the system bar. Played the audio from a YT video in chromium just fine.The included speakers are much bigger than pictured in the listing (thankfully), but they're nothing great. The board does have a pair of built in microphones- I did not test these. Now that I've had some time to play with it, I'm not sure it's worth the effort and HAT space over just using amplified speakers plugged into the RPi's headphone jack or stream audio through BT. I'm sure the audio quality is better through this HAT, but it's not high resolution or anything fancy like that. The onboard chip is from Wolfson and includes a Class D stereo 1w amplifier with <0.1% THD and 24bit delta sigma ADCs and DACs according to the datasheet.For the tinkerer wanting to explore audio in/out and maybe repurpose the ADC/DACs for fun, this could be a good choice. I can see a use with robotics.

The media could not be loaded. First of all, the size of the speakers that come with this HAT was a bit of a surprise. They appear small in the product photo but are actually a couple of inches tall each. They are pretty lousy quality, so I recommend replacing them with better speakers… but very handy for testing out the HAT.The HAT was easy to install on my Raspberry Pi Zero W: just pop in some header pins, place the HAT on top, and plug in the included speakers. Installing the software and utilities was trickier: following along the Waveshare wiki is usually a challenge. I was using dietpi for my base image so had to figure out which drivers and tools I needed that are normally baked into the operating system. I managed to get it all working in the end and do a quick test of recording and playback: easy peasy.I included a video of playing a sample song provided by waveshare - sounds much better on my laptop speakers than the provided ones, of course. This HAT is fine and functional, but I have used cheaper ones before that work just as well.