Wiring up a mini amp and speakers

To get some rocking audio going, we thought about wiring a BeagleBone Black up to a personal favorite device of ours: a c. 1960 Gruntal amplifier and radio:

We then thought better of it and decided to go with something a wee bit smaller for our recipe: the TPA2016 PCB, which contains a Texas Instruments chipset and is packaged as a final product by Adafruit:

It doesn't pack quite the volume as an ancient tube-based amp, but this surface-mount PCB amp is a heck of a lot handier and easier to use than our antique beauty. Also, it delivers nearly 3W of power for our tunes, plenty of volume for many situations. Additionally, its I2C interface allows us to control audio gain via software instead of using jumpers, switches, or other physical hardware.

In this recipe, you will learn how to set up and test the device on a breadboard with speakers and BeagleBone Black. Afterwards, in a later recipe, we'll use it as part of our kit to set up a listening library on the...