Hey Bela team,
I've recently had some fairly successful experiences using the Bela as a basic platform for prototyping wearables in workshop situations. One desire I have is to be able to simply and quickly prototype mixed haptic/audio wearable systems without having to develop any additional custom hardware beyond simple soldering and breadboarding.
The ideal setup would be to have independent headphone and one or more tactile outputs.. where the tactile outputs would go to something like a bone conducting transducer or a small exciter.
To keep difficulty & part count small I want to drive these haptic transducers off the Bela's built-in speaker amps. Now the issue I'm running into is that the headphone/line outs and the speaker amp inputs are coupled. I found a helpful guide to "hacking" this connection and injecting your own signals into the on-board amps in the Bela Hardware Explained part of the Wiki.
But I'm wondering.. what's the best approach here? Do I try and interface two of the analog outputs to the speaker amps to get the speaker outputs independent from the headphone outs? Or would it be better to leave the main outs as-is and run two of the analog outputs to a headphone plug?
I'm guessing either approach will require a bit of AC-coupling and maybe even level shifting with the analog outputs, I'm just wondering what would be the simplest and most straightforward way of doing this using a stock Bela?
thanks a bunch!