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Ask HN: Is there any open source/open hardware Echo Dot alike?

by nudpiedo on 8/11/23, 9:30 AM with 9 comments

Hi all, I wish to have my own customized smart speaker like echo dot, but fully programmable (Linux level).

For whatever reason I cannot even find any hardware alternatives, just some people who hacked the echo Dot’s bootloaders.

If anyone know any alternative hardware and projects to create such a platform, I would be thankful for that.

  • by rogierhofboer on 8/11/23, 8:59 PM

    https://mycroft.ai/product/mark-ii/

    Unfortunately it isn't going as well as they'd hoped: https://mycroft.ai/blog/update-from-the-ceo-part-1/

    Or you could try reSpeaker (different options available): https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/ReSpeaker/

    An older interesting comparison of mic arrays: https://medium.com/snips-ai/benchmarking-microphone-arrays-r...

  • by nativeit on 8/11/23, 4:17 PM

    The hardware is rather straightforward, something like a Raspberry Pi with off-the-shelf mems microphone module, powered Bluetooth receiver, battery + management (if you want it portable), and potentially some UART/SPI interface for more specific sensors/comms. The software I don’t have any direct experience with, but potentially something like Ada from HomeAssistant would be functional and easy to implement/integrate.

    Is there a particular part of this that seems most challenging for you? Would you be interested in developing something to fill this potential gap? I’m toying with a lot of the same tech right now, I’d be glad to contribute.

  • by AlexITC on 8/11/23, 9:05 PM

    This is the closest I have found, unfortunately, devices have been out of stock in many stores: https://github.com/espressif/esp-box

  • by nom on 8/11/23, 7:23 PM

    I think you can use a Bluetooth conference speaker for the audio part, they now have multi mic arrangements, echo cancellation, etc.

  • by kkielhofner on 8/13/23, 2:22 AM

    I created Willow, which uses the Espressif ESP BOX:

    https://github.com/toverainc/willow

  • by Zathu on 8/11/23, 11:43 AM

    Boombeastic Mini’s Pi case design could be an option?