The ready availability of Arduinos and similar technology has brought a lot of people into that scene who are not aware of what all is available to them, what all the bits and bobs are, and what you can bash together with a few resistors and capacitors hooked up correctly.
People like me. I think I can call myself tolerably good at programming, but I can easily tell I'm much more newb at EE and I can really only operate with things that have clearly defined outputs that match up to some other input. Where you may see trivial conversions you could bash together in your sleep, I see an output that doesn't match the input and don't immediately know where to go with that.
In my case, I'm able to follow the post just fine, but if I had to put that circuit together from scratch from first principles I'd be looking at weeks of learning more about EE. And as a result, as I am blundering about an unfamiliar landscape in some personal projects I've got going on, I appreciate posts like this.
> Low-effort clickbait? Or an innocent misunderstanding by someone who thinks DACs have to be expensive?
Probably the latter. Things like Arduino and cheap ESP modules from china have made electronics vastly more accessible than they were previously. Given that, it makes sense that somebody wouldn't really understand _how_ a DAC works but would understand what one does, what it's used for and that the datasheet for $currentModule says there is none present.
In think they just mean "on-chip/integrated DAC peripheral" when they say DAC (which is what a lot of hobbyists/non EE folk think of from the term). The article's just trying to say you don't need one for an audio use case and can use a discreet RC.
That’d be some mighty selective baiting leading to a disappointingly feeble number of clicks. Unless the population of Arduino+audio nerds is secretly massive, which I’m pretty sure is not the case.
Nope, that's what they're actually doing. Congrats, you've built a very simple external DAC.
Low-effort clickbait? Or an innocent misunderstanding by someone who thinks DACs have to be expensive?