Esparagus Echo

What is it?

Esparagus Echo is a series of two ESP32-S3-based voice control edge devices. They are designed to work with ESPHome as an edge part of the voice control pipeline. Both devices are enclosed in a neat-looking aluminum case and expose feedback LEDs on the front panel where it is easy to spot them, leaving power and speaker connectors on the backside.

Motivation

I’m a big fan of Alexa. I’m using it around the house, and my family is using it all the time, including 2 years old. However, I do not need to mention privacy concerns, these are quite common. My biggest pain point is the inability to integrate Alexa into the Home Assistant setup that I have at home. I’m a big fan of automation around the house and want to trigger complex flows based on the specific sensors and devices that I have. I think the freedom of the implementation is a bit like the magic of the Home Assistant. Why not have voice control, since everyone around the house is used to it already?

Esparagus Solo

Esparagus Solo has all the basic necessities, a Mic on the front panel, a couple of feedback LEDs, and a speaker at the back. Onboard is a simple and well-known MAX98357 DAC with a reasonable 5W of output audio. It uses a built-in antenna for simplicity. And that’s pretty much it.

Esparagus Duo

On top of Solo capabilities, Esparagus Duo uses a dual Mic setup, extra LED, and most importantly 2-channels MAX98357 channels to deliver quality stereo-audio (and thus can be used as a media player device). To make sure it would stream audio without a hiccup it uses an external Wifi antenna (much-improved perception) and has SPI Ethernet for the most robust networking.

Features

MCU Core

  • ESP32-s3 Dual Core 32-bit LX7 microprocessor running at 240 MHz
  • 16 MB of flash storage
  • 8 MB of PSRAM
  • USB communication / flashing / debug

Audio capabilities

Peripherals

  • WS2812B RGB Front LED (2x on Solo, 3x on Duo)
  • External Wi-Fi Antenna (Duo only)
  • W5500 Ethernet (Duo only)

Other

  • RESET and GPIO0 (FLASH) buttons
  • 45 x 18 x 52 mm Aluminum case (Solo)
  • 70 x 24 x 88 mm Aluminum case (Duo)

Onboard PSRAM

Audio streaming require proper buffering to work, even with ESP32 500K of RAM it is a challenging task. Esparagus Echo has 8MB PSRAM chip onboard, connected via high-speed octal-SPI interface. On the S3 model, all memory is available to the code (not limited to 4Mb as on the ESP32)

ESPHome config

  • media-player is a simple external speaker based on the Arduino framework
  • voice-assistans is a work-in-progress configuration based on esp-adf pipeline and wake-word detection.

Documentation

Both software and hardware documentation can be found on project’s Github. You can follow project progress at Hackaday

Where to buy

You may support our work by ordering this product at Tindie (coming soon)