Atom Echo works for a while after restart, but then stops responding

Configuration Voice Assistant
1

My experiment with Voice Assistant has come to an impass. After a restart, it works great for a command or two, recognising my custom wake word (“Hey, Casper”) and doing what I ask (e.g., running my sentence-triggered automations), but stops after awhile (an hour or so). No amount of yelling gets it to turn blue until I restart again. The kids and spouse are starting to make fun of me and my attempts to get that @£$%@ white box to turn blue…

What do you all suggest I try to narrow down the issue, so I can regain my dignity and stop yelling cartoon characters at the living room wall?

Background: I use a container-based install. The relevant section of my docker-compose.yml looks like the following, and it’s composed with Home Assistant and Node Red. I just recently added --debug, which does not appear to do much.

  openwakeword:
    container_name: openwakeword
    image: rhasspy/wyoming-openwakeword
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
      - /media/homeassistant/home_assistant/openwakeword/custom:/custom
      - /media/homeassistant/home_assistant/openwakeword/config:/config
      - /media/homeassistant/home_assistant/openwakeword/data:/data
    environment:
      TZ: "Europe/London"
    depends_on:
      - homeassistant
    ports:
      - 10400:10400
      - 10400:10400/udp
    command: --debug --preload-model 'ok_nabu' --custom-model-dir /custom
    restart: unless-stopped
1 Like
2

I have this issue intermittently as well, is there a way to automate waking it up periodically?

3

Same here, overall the little Atom Echos are doing a great job, sometimes recognising the wake word across large rooms.
However, they seem to always hang up after some time and a reset is necessary to make them work again.
What would we have to include in the config file to restart them periodically?

I tried including a switch or button in the config, to restart via an automation in Home Assistant but that led to an error.

Thanks

Merc

4

Just build a Wyoming satellite. They work. Youll be up and running in less than an hour.

5

Thanks for the suggestion.
Since the Atom Echos are not doing a bad job, in general, I would still be interested in a solution to the issue of them “crashing” frequently. I am sure there must be a way to stop/circumvene or mitigate this.

6

I have now found a way that seems to improve the stability of the Atom Echos in my setup.

Every 15 minutes I am switching the “detect wake work” off and back on 2 seconds later. Through this it seems, that the Echos do not freeze.
Ideally, I would like to trigger a restart but I cannot figure out how to make a switch or button work that would trigger the restart through an automation.

I still have to run this for a longer time to see for how long it works but so far it looks promising and is relatively easy to realize.

7

You can set up an automation to turn off wake word detection if there is noone in the room. Thats what I did when I had ESP32 voice assistants.
Assuming you have room presence sensors anyway…

8

Hi Rich,
Not enterily sure how or if this solves the problem but then I do not have room presence detection.
The approach I mentioned above seems to work.
Combined with a sound response to wake word detection this has improved my voice assistant setup a lot.

Cheers

Merc

9

You can add:

button:
  - platform: restart
    name: "${friendly_name} Restart"

to the YAML of the echo to create a restart button, I use this to force restarts evewry 30 minutes which helps with the voice recognition.

10

Ah, thanks @yalexau,
will give that a try.
The toggling of a switch has already improved things a lot.

But this was my main goal.

Cheers

Merc

EDIT:

Hm…ok I still keep getting the error I got before when I tried to implement the start button:

HARDWARE: ESP32 240MHz, 320KB RAM, 4MB Flash
 - framework-espidf @ 3.40407.0 (4.4.7) 
 - tool-cmake @ 3.16.4 
 - tool-ninja @ 1.7.1 
 - toolchain-esp32ulp @ 2.35.0-20220830 
 - toolchain-xtensa-esp32 @ 8.4.0+2021r2-patch5
Reading CMake configuration...
Dependency Graph
|-- noise-c @ 0.1.4
|-- ESPMicroSpeechFeatures @ 1.0.0
Linking .pioenvs/m5stack-atom-echo/firmware.elf
/data/cache/platformio/packages/toolchain-xtensa-esp32/bin/../lib/gcc/xtensa-esp32-elf/8.4.0/../../../../xtensa-esp32-elf/bin/ld: missing --end-group; added as last command line option
/data/cache/platformio/packages/toolchain-xtensa-esp32/bin/../lib/gcc/xtensa-esp32-elf/8.4.0/../../../../xtensa-esp32-elf/bin/ld: .pioenvs/m5stack-atom-echo/src/main.o:(.literal._Z5setupv+0xa0): undefined reference to `vtable for esphome::restart::RestartButton'
/data/cache/platformio/packages/toolchain-xtensa-esp32/bin/../lib/gcc/xtensa-esp32-elf/8.4.0/../../../../xtensa-esp32-elf/bin/ld: .pioenvs/m5stack-atom-echo/src/main.o:(.literal._Z5setupv+0xa4): undefined reference to `vtable for esphome::restart::RestartButton'
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
*** [.pioenvs/m5stack-atom-echo/firmware.elf] Error 1
========================= [FAILED] Took 28.53 seconds =========================

Any idea what I need to change to get rid of this?

EDIT:

Finally I found the answer to the issue in this thread.
I was not aware of the “clean build” option but that did the job.