
The Adafruit Audio FX Mini Sound Board ($19.95) is a great solution if you want your next electronics project to make a little noise. The board doesn’t require an Arduino — or any other microprocessor or additional memory — to run. All it needs is a little juice, in the form of a 3V to 5.5 V battery.
Adafruit crammed a lot into the 1.5″ x 0.9″ board, including 16 MB of memory, a stereo line out, and a micro USB jack, so you can drag and drop your files onto the board from your laptop — as though the board was a USB key. The board can play Ogg Vorbis and WAV files and handles 44.1KHz 16 bit stereo sound. Up to 8 buttons can be attached to the board, and five different kinds of triggers can be used without any coding, including play next, play random, and loop.