dywen - Can the Bela Mini handle Microphone input ?
There is an onboard mic preamp in the TLV320 codec which gives up to 59.5dB of gain. Inputs are unbalanced and there is no phantom power.
- Can the Bela Mini handle Microphone input power and handle input of an electret microphone?
You need an external resistor from 3.3V to the mic input. On regular Bela there is a lower-noise 2.5V voltage source specifically to power the electret capsule (still needs an external resistor).
- Can the Bela Mini play several high quality samples (wav?raw?) at the same time (Samples can be long -
up to several minutes)?
- Can Bela Mini record hight quality audio samples? is there a time limit?
It can record and playback 44.1kHz audio at 16 bit. Time limit is space limit. We ship 16 GB SD cards so you have about 14GB of space for audio. RAM is 512 MB.
- Can the Bela deal with serious :-) granular synthesis?
I guess it depends on how it is programmed. What language are you using?
- Can you use 2 mpr121 capacitive touch sensors boards with one Bela?
As long as you can set two different addresses on them, then you can connect them on the same I2C bus. If you can't, then you can use two different I2C busses. Example code is here https://github.com/BelaPlatform/Bela/blob/master/examples/06-Sensors/capacitive-touch/
- Why in the pre-order/shop you propose to buy this: 1 x extra Audio Adapter Cables: £3.00
If I understood it correctly, Bela Mini does stereo sound out, not multichannel?
These are stereo breakout cables from a Molex-like 3-pin connector to a stereo 3.5mm female jack socket. Each cape comes with two of them (one for stereo input, one for stereo output). The option to buy extras is for the case when the user plans to need more as spares (e.g.: say you are building an enclosure for Bela, you may want to panel mount the jack sockets. However, you will still want to use your Bela stand-alone, outside the box. So you need two pair of cables, one to stay in the box and the other to stay with the Bela outside the box).
- How does Bela & Beaglebone deal with a sudden loss of power whilst it is still computing? Raspberry Pi
does not like this and often sd cards get corrupted.
It is fine. It is not as sensitive as the Pi. We have not had reports of SD cards getting corrupted this way and we regularly use instruments based on Bela. We are working on making it even better: https://forum.bela.io/d/550-read-only-root-fs/2