3mm jack

[Fester Bestertester]

G'day!

This is liable to be a bit too big for the blog, so herewith:

With most users not using the 3mm socket for video &/or audio out (HDMI?), it becomes useless: why not use it for (audio) input ? The Pi's guts is basically a smart-phone, ennit? They have microphones, yes? therefore the necessary internals and drop-in-the-bucket processing power to deal with it? Should be trivial to provide an option (cmdline.txt?) to reassign and config for line (stereo) input or (powered/electret?) mic, and pipe that into the audio system. OK, a USB dongle or headset works fine, but there's loads of legacy stuff out there too, and at no extra expense.

Worth a thought?

[6by9]

Almost all phones use external audio codec chips, generally using i2s. Certainly there is no analogue audio input on the SoC itself.

[jdb]

6by9 is correct, there's no true analogue input available on Raspberry Pi. The I2S peripheral in theory supports PDM microphone input, though that's never really been tested. Thus the 3.5mm jack firmly remains output-only.

There are a wide variety of I2S addon HATs that implement microphone/line-in, though.