this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Curious to see how many people here are using Wyoming Satellites, and if so, what are you doing to build/house them?

I have a sample one working on an old pi and a computer speaker hooked up, with my primary Blue mic. Obviously this isn't long term, and I'm looking at building a few of these.

So, what do you use? Raspberry pi? Some sort of hat on it? What sort of casing do you use? Any really cool implementations? I'll take all ideas and suggestions!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I've accomplished this with the Atom Echo and they work... fine?

The speaker is essentially inaudible, but the mic works well enough for me to just yell at HomeAssistant to do things.

And hey, can't beat the size/price/power footprint and the deployment with ESPHome takes like, 30 seconds.

[–] Uncurious3512 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for sharing! Do you know of a guide you can share on how to get it up and running?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Yep, it's fully supported in HA/ESP32 and is suuuuuper easy to deploy and configure and the HA devs even documented how: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/thirteen-usd-voice-remote/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

These are neat! Good note about the speaker, I'll try one out

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

If all you need is for it to go 'I turned on the light', they're fine. I wouldn't expect to use them for anything more detailed or music-oriented.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

I only have one at the moment. I bought a cheap Dell Wyse thin client from eBay, installed a light Linux distro on it and set it up as a Wyoming Satellite and as a snapcast client. That is connected to an old all in one mini HiFi for speakers. For the mic I just have a small omnidirectional USB mic plugged into the front. Biggest hassle setting it up was ALSA since snapcast and Wyoming were fighting over the devices

[–] dbrand666 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I have a couple of Pi Zeros around the house I use as media players. They were running piCorePlayer. I replaced just the software with a vanilla Pi OS and installed Squeezelite and then Wyoming Satellite. I added a microphone and an automation to silence the media player as soon as a wake word is detected.

Voice recognition is adequate but I wish it was smarter.

(I should finish that blog post...)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I would definitely be interested

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I'm still dabbling with this, but so far I have a Pi Zero2W with a reSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT and an old speaker (no idea where from) that (luckily?) has the correct connector on.

It's ok as a geeky POC, but it needs work to gain sufficient WAF

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I am making an esphome system for my old Yamaha AV receiver. RCA out via a cheap i2s chip, mems I2S mic in the enclosure that can hear well enough in the room, and an IR blaster output to change the AV receiver channel to the esp when voice is activated and change it back after.

Cool side effect is that it can also be used as an HA media player for streaming Spotify and local music to the speaker system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

This sounds like a good solution for my receiver too, I want some satellites around the house but I was wondering how I would hook it up to the main system

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I host Wyoming on a server with an Nvidia 4060ti, and point home assistant, on a vm on another server, to it. It works great.

[–] spitfire 2 points 5 months ago

He was asking about satellites, the end devices that have mics/speakers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

For so many of my use cases the Echo and Echo Show products by Amazon are exactly what is needed. For instance in the living my full sized echo is ideal for voice commands and playing music but in my bedroom a Show 5 / 8 is what you want in order to see the time, play music, and have wakeup alarms. I wish I could either find a company building a generic version of them or find a way to reload them to work with HA instead of Amazon. :/

I'd buy Android tablets and run the HA Companion App on them but it still doesn't have wakeword support.

I could build a small fleet of rPIs in touch screen cases but even then you have to bolt on a microphone and speakers so they still wouldn't have a finished / polished look.

I have no problem spending a reasonable, or even maybe unreasonable, amount of money to get a nice looking Wyoming Satellite but I'll be darned if I can figure out HOW. I'm actually kind of astonished that no over-seas manufacturer has started making something like a gutted Echo / Echo Show that you can slide a raspberry pi board into.