So I’ve had great success with ReSpeaker Lite in my Home Assistant environment. The adoption to ESPHome is simple, the built-in wake words seem to have a better pickup distance than the 3m advertised, and by including some LLM I’m close to severing the Amazon Alexa connection. I’ve used CAD to build 3d prints for both a standalone case and a case with a 2" speaker housing that I can flush mount to my walls and use PoE to USB for power. I have 2 challenges I’m seeking to resolve:
- At max output the speaker is a bit loud and has enough distortion that I’d rather just bring it down around 30-50%. I’m sure I can figure something out schematically to reduce the volume, but I was hoping there was a i2c switch or something that I could put in the config to take it down a notch.
- I’d love to be able to use the ReSpeaker Lite as a media satellite but I don’t see much out there as far as the process by which I can make this happen. If it can’t, no worries. I’m good with resolving 1 and letting music playback happen through other means.