So I finally got the boards in from PCBWay and just installed on into a Nest Mini. Worked great. I just need to troubleshoot improving the speed of the action performed when I talk to assist. Thanks for the great tutorial!
Another great video Mark 😎 I too would be an Echo man so hopefully someone else produces a custom PCB for it also 🤞 Anyway, have a super Christmas Mark 🍻
Sounds like an interesting project. Seeing as the creator of this project made the schematics and the source code public, it shouldn't be too much effort to adapt to an echo. I might get on it, if I find the time
Currently and sadly, the needed esp-idf framework has no media_player component available as this is not ported (yet?). That's the only reason I hold back on my Onju board order.
Shame you can only get a replacement board for the Nest Mini (V2) and not the original Google Mini (V1) which I have a few (given to me) that I will never use with Google.
One thing I'd wonder (more about the HA voice than this device in particular) is what if multiple speakers hear your command? Does it prioritize based on which speaker heard the command first? Is this configurable?
Just ran through this. It does work rather well! now to just figure out how to make it stream music as well from the music assistant 2.0 addon.... Any chance you remember what setting in your script controls the LED's being on while the device is idle? been playing with it for a while now, but no luck so far
The Home Assistant setup he showed is local only, though you can pay to have it hosted by them. Home Assistant is hosted on a local computer, a lot of people us Raspberry Pis, but if you want to run off-grid Voice Recognition, that you'll want something more powerful.
You can get the home assistant box which uses a Raspberry PI 4 compute module. It won't be the fastest thing out there, but it can run a few voice assistants alright.
I've been wanting to try to convert a Google Home Mini into an always-on audio recorder that saves audio to an NVR - which can be transcribed and accessed the same way people would access recorded security video. This might be a good way to start, thanks!
Great video 😊 most of the way through now. Well described as usual. Have a esp8266, inmp441 (microphone), max98357 (amp/audio out) and 2W speaker ordered a week ago making it's way from china to experiment for £18. We're both UK based if want to do a video on DIY solution would post to you.
@grahamdavid007 Watched videos on the atom. Mono sound keeps the device small + good enough for a voice assistance. Add bluetooth presence detection. Add a couple environment sensors like temperature, humidity, lux.
If I choose the PCBonly option, does it come with the components and I just have to solder them on myself or is it really just the PCB and I have to buy all the components separately?
I've also got my boards and installed them into two Nest Mini 2. Both works, but I've noticed that after 12 hours they just stopped responding, look like mics are not active. I don't see any coming logs in ESP Home until I restart Nest Mini by plugging off the power cord. Any idea of reason of it ?
You can hookup speakers directly to an esp and do something identical :) espmuse used to sell boards you could just add speakers to and get them into HA.
You can use a old computer or a raspberry pi and connect in speakers and a microphone and do the same thing. You can also get a ESP32 dev board and hook up a I2C speaker module and speaker and do the same.
It would be nice if Google would allow us to create 3rd party firmware for our Google devices. I've got 2 Google Home Mini devices, but I'm not using them because I dont want Google listening to me. I'd love to use them and not throw them away, but it looks like Google will never allow open the bootloader.
Being able to take control of what it does and knowing it's not sending data anywhere you don't want it to. You can also setup scripts to run on voice commands, so it's a heck of a lot more flexible... Yeah, it doesn't play music yet, and there's no alarms either, but those are being actively worked towards.
You should definitely get the assembled if you don't want to source all of the tiny board components and solder them on yourself. If you're even asking, you probably should have them do it for you
This is a great little project to have a tinker with but if you are planning on switching from google I would definitely suggest waiting on more support from ESPHome with things like media playback etc etc. At the minute this would just be a HA device and nothing you could play music quickly and efficiently through.
Playing music seems like one of the least important features (albeit nice to have), the winner here is de-googling the microphones, nice looking case, etc to run with Home Assistant in a local capacity.
Added a link to the description. It's a miniwear ES15. Very pricey but I got one for about £70. You get a little set of drill bits with it. Great little tool.
Interesting! Could be time to play a little with Home Assistant again. I've been working lately on phasing Alexa out. She works well and in the past Philips Hue had big issues with Google (or the other way round, didn't pair, sync and work well). However lately I'm becomming annoyed by Alexa for a few reasons. She constantly reminds me to buy new batteries and you have to disable it on a per device basis - I'll change batteries when they're not working - not when there's still many months of use still left in them. Second when you sync devices she doesn't clean out old stuff that are no longer referenced in the linked accounts - that is even more annoying. So in the near future she's retired and replaced solely by Google - which by the way speaks my native language while Alexa doesn't
@@ZestysoftHere are three clues it's mostly stagnant: 1) 2 months is a long time for zero new commits. 2) All contributions so far have been by the same user. 3) The README says, "This is not being actively maintained." 0:10 So, while the potential sounds great, the project seems to be very stagnant.
I'm pretty sure I remember the creator said he wasn't going to maintain the project on X (Twitter) when it first gained traction as it was just to challenge himself for a personal project. That's also why he isn't selling it
So far the best method I have found is to look at the bottom of your nest mini. If it has a mounting hole then its gen 2, if no mounting hole then gen 1.
I know its too late now but these google minis are on sale every black friday for £20 new, so i think second hand they are over priced, however they are what they are.
Unfortunately ordering custom pcb's means a minimum order of 5. It would be great if we could form a co-op buying these if we only need 1, so it doesn't cost $86 to end up with 4 extra boards. If anyone who has these was interested in testing and selling thier spare boards, that would be awesome as well
Imo it’s not as good as an non modified google home, mostly due to the time you have to wait between the wake work and the command sentence. And I would be surprised that the mic array works as good as the original one.
If you are running HA and the ESP Home Voice Assistant pipeline on a Raspberry PI together there is lag; if you are running HA ona much faster AMD or Intel X86 solution, response is almost the same as an Amazon Echo or Google device. YWMV
Nice project ! How do you manage the speech recognition (is it possible to test it ?) and the text-to-speech function ? I need only a speech recognition witch can run a web request. Is it possible with your project and without home assistant ?
That was done with home assistant voice assistant pipeline. There aren't that many options for locally run voice assistants, it might be the only one right now. If you Don't want to run home assistant, then you don't even need this project as you can just turn on a googke nest and use the google assistant
Thank you for the video. I'm also interested about streaming audio. Is always compatible with Spotify or can be as media player throughout home assistant? Tks
In the generated config that you replace with your prepared one, you can see a WiFi password you typed in in the step before. It looks "too authentic" to be a random placeholder. Might want to check that. Otherwise great video, I was looking into using myroft to build an interactive music/story player for my kids, but this might be an easier way without to much tinkering.
Are you on about the access point hotspot password? If so then its not a big deal. That's like when you turn on hotspot on your phone and someone else has to type in a password to connect to it. It was probably auto generated if I was to guess pal.
@@kyedavright, my bad. I missed the comment about it being a hotspot and thought it might have revealed the password he typed in. I watched on mobile and was too lazy to rewind and properly check it😅
The special bit of the Echo is the dsp algs running in software on its hardware. Without you just have a really bad broadcast mic and likely you have just wasted your $ and much of your time.
@@MrNickRout you can buy a Ferrari and put nyan cat decals all over it and then Ferrari sues you. If Google was the kind of company that protected their brand like that...
Because it doesn't use cloud based service and can be done locally if required.. Whereas Google/Alexa are monitored by corporations..and harvesting your data.
yes, it doesn't rely on the cloud. But from my experience of using voice assist on HA. It's 'miles' away from being a viable day-to-day replacement to Alexa or Google. Believe me, I'd love to bin off the old 'NSA Pringles Tin' but the functionality still isn't there yet for me. Plus, if you're looking for natural language parsing, you're likely to still be relying on OpenAI's cloud services.
@@richardlyd7450 definitely, and I’m sure they’ll get there eventually. But I think anyone doing this right now might be in for disappointment if they haven’t already been tinkering with it and are aware of the current shortcomings.
Can you just teach us how to change the name of the assistants we already have? I don't want to say "Alexa," or "Hey Siri," or "Ok Google" anymore. I just want to say "computer," like in Star Trek.
Excellent tutorial Mark and really liking the more professional format. Well done.
It felt more serious trying to be concise and straight to the point 😂. HAve a great Christmas!
Wanted to do this for far too long. Thank you for the hard work! 🎉
Thank you :)
Man- projects like this are so freaking cool.
So I finally got the boards in from PCBWay and just installed on into a Nest Mini. Worked great. I just need to troubleshoot improving the speed of the action performed when I talk to assist. Thanks for the great tutorial!
Since pcbway has a minimum order amount, do you have spare boards to sell? If you tested, i would be interested in buying a known working one
@@victorlowe did you end up getting any boards? I'm having the same issue lol
This was so helpful, really appreciate the time you put into this.
Another great video Mark 😎
I too would be an Echo man so hopefully someone else produces a custom PCB for it also 🤞
Anyway, have a super Christmas Mark 🍻
Maybe we will see something similar next year. Have a great Christmas also!
Sounds like an interesting project. Seeing as the creator of this project made the schematics and the source code public, it shouldn't be too much effort to adapt to an echo.
I might get on it, if I find the time
If nobody will do it in 2024 I might do it over the next Christmas holidays ...
Can you reproduce music after the pcb upgrade? Does Hassio recognise the device also as a multimedia system?
Currently and sadly, the needed esp-idf framework has no media_player component available as this is not ported (yet?). That's the only reason I hold back on my Onju board order.
Ahhh :( one of the main uses for me is to play music synced across the house in multiple speakers. Really need to keep that functionality :'(
What a great job you've done! For me I can only wait for a real product to be available for sale. Maybe next year I hope.
Brilliant walk through Mark👍🏻
Bought my 5 of these. They work great!
Shame you can only get a replacement board for the Nest Mini (V2) and not the original Google Mini (V1) which I have a few (given to me) that I will never use with Google.
One thing I'd wonder (more about the HA voice than this device in particular) is what if multiple speakers hear your command? Does it prioritize based on which speaker heard the command first? Is this configurable?
Yes, first one that acknowledges the wake word. Not configurable atm
Great tutorial. Thanks! I am def doing something to replace Alexa! Can’t wait!
can you get a timer working? Thats probably the biggest thing i use my echo for is setting timers when cooking.
Just ran through this. It does work rather well! now to just figure out how to make it stream music as well from the music assistant 2.0 addon....
Any chance you remember what setting in your script controls the LED's being on while the device is idle? been playing with it for a while now, but no luck so far
Is there a way to do this off grid? Most require internet for voice recognition libraries - any way to set up an offline local mirror?
The Home Assistant setup he showed is local only, though you can pay to have it hosted by them. Home Assistant is hosted on a local computer, a lot of people us Raspberry Pis, but if you want to run off-grid Voice Recognition, that you'll want something more powerful.
You can get the home assistant box which uses a Raspberry PI 4 compute module. It won't be the fastest thing out there, but it can run a few voice assistants alright.
I've been wanting to try to convert a Google Home Mini into an always-on audio recorder that saves audio to an NVR - which can be transcribed and accessed the same way people would access recorded security video. This might be a good way to start, thanks!
can you turn the volume of the speaker up and down as normal? I have a M5Stack ECO and the speaker is so small its useless.
Do you happen to know if you can still use the nest mini for streaming music after the change over?
Does this reuse the nest microphone or is there a separate microphone on the pcb?
Microphone on the PCB it looks like from the BOM (SPH0645LM4H-B)
Does this work entirely locally and offline?
Great video 😊 most of the way through now. Well described as usual.
Have a esp8266, inmp441 (microphone), max98357 (amp/audio out) and 2W speaker ordered a week ago making it's way from china to experiment for £18. We're both UK based if want to do a video on DIY solution would post to you.
In addition I'm UK based open to ordering 5 fully assembled if anyone wants to share the cost just intrigued by it.
we're developing HA based 'smart building' products - atom looked good but mono no-good :-( your thoughts? cheers
@grahamdavid007
Watched videos on the atom.
Mono sound keeps the device small + good enough for a voice assistance.
Add bluetooth presence detection.
Add a couple environment sensors like temperature, humidity, lux.
your github has disappeared can you share the configure you refer to.
Good stuff Mark. Thank you.
Glad you enjoyed it :)
Anyone know if the hardware will work with the microWakeWork that just got released? It sounds like microWakeWork requires External RAM to work.
If I choose the PCBonly option, does it come with the components and I just have to solder them on myself or is it really just the PCB and I have to buy all the components separately?
I've also got my boards and installed them into two Nest Mini 2. Both works, but I've noticed that after 12 hours they just stopped responding, look like mics are not active. I don't see any coming logs in ESP Home until I restart Nest Mini by plugging off the power cord. Any idea of reason of it ?
Have you managed to solve this issue, or did you stop using them?
is there any slimar project that utilizes old conference speakers?
You can hookup speakers directly to an esp and do something identical :) espmuse used to sell boards you could just add speakers to and get them into HA.
You can use a old computer or a raspberry pi and connect in speakers and a microphone and do the same thing. You can also get a ESP32 dev board and hook up a I2C speaker module and speaker and do the same.
Thank you! Cool project.
I searched for the esp32-s3-box-3 where can one be purchased? I didn't get any luck on Amazon or eBay ?
I got my unit from Mouser UK. There was a huge backlog when I ordered though. They are also available from AliExpress.
Thanks for setting off my S3-Box3 that's sitting right next to my TV lol
Sorry! 😂🙈.
Merry Christmas?
Amazing video! liked and subscribed !
Thanks for the sub!
It would be nice if Google would allow us to create 3rd party firmware for our Google devices. I've got 2 Google Home Mini devices, but I'm not using them because I dont want Google listening to me. I'd love to use them and not throw them away, but it looks like Google will never allow open the bootloader.
If you switch off the mic, you can still use them as speakers in home assistant
What is the benefit here except HA integration
Being able to take control of what it does and knowing it's not sending data anywhere you don't want it to. You can also setup scripts to run on voice commands, so it's a heck of a lot more flexible... Yeah, it doesn't play music yet, and there's no alarms either, but those are being actively worked towards.
Do you plan on selling single boards? I think that would be pretty smart.
Is there a way to send tts to the speaker or play music on it?
I have an Echo 1 lying around, would be nice to do a similar replacement there.
Does "hey google" still work?
It won't no. This board removes all google home in exchange for a local controlled voice assistant. The feature set is also still quite limited.
What a great video! If ordering from PCBway. Should I get the assembled or pcb only?
You should definitely get the assembled if you don't want to source all of the tiny board components and solder them on yourself. If you're even asking, you probably should have them do it for you
Is there an Alexa version?
Anyone based in UK an interested to share the Order from PCBWay ? I would like two pcbs and looking for people who can join me in ordering
Hii, does anyone bought some of this board and I can buy one of it in Germany? Thx
I am also from Germany and would love to do this so if we find a couple more people we could order them
Another winner, thanks. Do you feel it's real world ready
This is a great little project to have a tinker with but if you are planning on switching from google I would definitely suggest waiting on more support from ESPHome with things like media playback etc etc. At the minute this would just be a HA device and nothing you could play music quickly and efficiently through.
Playing music seems like one of the least important features (albeit nice to have), the winner here is de-googling the microphones, nice looking case, etc to run with Home Assistant in a local capacity.
Nice video, before I do this changes, I use a lot my nest minis tu put some musique, is this able to do it?
Thank you!
Can you leave a link for the awesome screwdriver? 🤔
Added a link to the description. It's a miniwear ES15. Very pricey but I got one for about £70. You get a little set of drill bits with it. Great little tool.
❤ thanks for the video. Can I Use my name. Example ok Jarvis, OK David to use it? Hope your answer
You can use custom wakewords yes :)
Anyone have any boards in the US? I just need 1.
Does this work for google home or only nest mini
Once you switch the board it won't work with Google Home anymore
@@j33089a yes google home mini . Will this work for that !
Interesting! Could be time to play a little with Home Assistant again. I've been working lately on phasing Alexa out. She works well and in the past Philips Hue had big issues with Google (or the other way round, didn't pair, sync and work well). However lately I'm becomming annoyed by Alexa for a few reasons. She constantly reminds me to buy new batteries and you have to disable it on a per device basis - I'll change batteries when they're not working - not when there's still many months of use still left in them. Second when you sync devices she doesn't clean out old stuff that are no longer referenced in the linked accounts - that is even more annoying. So in the near future she's retired and replaced solely by Google - which by the way speaks my native language while Alexa doesn't
How soon before it's connected to a generative ai ... Eg Chat GPT?
Videos on youtube already where others have set the conversation agent OpenAI left all the other settings the same.
Based on what I see on GitHub the project looks stalled and no longer in development...
The last commit was only two months ago!
@@ZestysoftHere are three clues it's mostly stagnant: 1) 2 months is a long time for zero new commits. 2) All contributions so far have been by the same user. 3) The README says, "This is not being actively maintained." 0:10 So, while the potential sounds great, the project seems to be very stagnant.
If it ain't broke why fix it?
I'm pretty sure I remember the creator said he wasn't going to maintain the project on X (Twitter) when it first gained traction as it was just to challenge himself for a personal project. That's also why he isn't selling it
Sincerely, hoping this project starts to gain traction and get picked back up by the current maintainer or forked.
Great video...how do I check and see if it is a Nest Mini 2? I really don't know...thanks in advance...and Happy Holidays...😊
So far the best method I have found is to look at the bottom of your nest mini. If it has a mounting hole then its gen 2, if no mounting hole then gen 1.
Can someone send me on in the us/East coast?
I know its too late now but these google minis are on sale every black friday for £20 new, so i think second hand they are over priced, however they are what they are.
Unfortunately ordering custom pcb's means a minimum order of 5. It would be great if we could form a co-op buying these if we only need 1, so it doesn't cost $86 to end up with 4 extra boards.
If anyone who has these was interested in testing and selling thier spare boards, that would be awesome as well
Imo it’s not as good as an non modified google home, mostly due to the time you have to wait between the wake work and the command sentence.
And I would be surprised that the mic array works as good as the original one.
If you are running HA and the ESP Home Voice Assistant pipeline on a Raspberry PI together there is lag; if you are running HA ona much faster AMD or Intel X86 solution, response is almost the same as an Amazon Echo or Google device. YWMV
My google home is already slow as dog sht. I wouldn't tell the difference
Nice project ! How do you manage the speech recognition (is it possible to test it ?) and the text-to-speech function ?
I need only a speech recognition witch can run a web request. Is it possible with your project and without home assistant ?
That was done with home assistant voice assistant pipeline. There aren't that many options for locally run voice assistants, it might be the only one right now. If you Don't want to run home assistant, then you don't even need this project as you can just turn on a googke nest and use the google assistant
Love this - like you would really like a way to convert all my Alexa devices...
Thank you for the video. I'm also interested about streaming audio. Is always compatible with Spotify or can be as media player throughout home assistant? Tks
In the generated config that you replace with your prepared one, you can see a WiFi password you typed in in the step before.
It looks "too authentic" to be a random placeholder. Might want to check that.
Otherwise great video, I was looking into using myroft to build an interactive music/story player for my kids, but this might be an easier way without to much tinkering.
Are you on about the access point hotspot password? If so then its not a big deal. That's like when you turn on hotspot on your phone and someone else has to type in a password to connect to it. It was probably auto generated if I was to guess pal.
@@kyedavright, my bad. I missed the comment about it being a hotspot and thought it might have revealed the password he typed in.
I watched on mobile and was too lazy to rewind and properly check it😅
@@MaDFsX all good man. Happens to the best of us haha
Micro -USB. Never thought I'd get to hear this word again...
I know right 😂
anyone want to sell me a board ? i live in belgium
I would love to swap my amazon echos :D
nas mini twooooo
The special bit of the Echo is the dsp algs running in software on its hardware. Without you just have a really bad broadcast mic and likely you have just wasted your $ and much of your time.
If anyone from Germany wants to build this thing I would love to share a PCB order
Configurationnnnn
if google was a truly evil company they would send a lawsuit in like a cruise missile
How? It is your hardware once you bought it.
@@MrNickRout you can buy a Ferrari and put nyan cat decals all over it and then Ferrari sues you. If Google was the kind of company that protected their brand like that...
Uff 5 pcb yeah I have no friend !
I will have one for sale when mine arrive.
@@grahamshaw5531 i bet you sell in US ?
I'm in New Zealand.@@PierreLeroy76620
asp høme
I just wondered why someone would want to do tis swop out 😅
Because it doesn't use cloud based service and can be done locally if required..
Whereas Google/Alexa are monitored by corporations..and harvesting your data.
Hi, I thought that was the reason, thank for confirming 👍
yes, it doesn't rely on the cloud. But from my experience of using voice assist on HA. It's 'miles' away from being a viable day-to-day replacement to Alexa or Google.
Believe me, I'd love to bin off the old 'NSA Pringles Tin' but the functionality still isn't there yet for me. Plus, if you're looking for natural language parsing, you're likely to still be relying on OpenAI's cloud services.
@@marria01 yes..I agree...but I suppose we all gotta start somewhere!
@@richardlyd7450 definitely, and I’m sure they’ll get there eventually.
But I think anyone doing this right now might be in for disappointment if they haven’t already been tinkering with it and are aware of the current shortcomings.
Can you just teach us how to change the name of the assistants we already have?
I don't want to say "Alexa," or "Hey Siri," or "Ok Google" anymore.
I just want to say "computer," like in Star Trek.
You can do that 😁. In a future video I will show how to setup custom wake words