As I wanted since a long time have some wireless speakers around home, and now that Sendspin is avalaible, it looked like the good time to go into it. I have bought a Louder ESP32 board that looked very promising in specs but quite disappointed with the real product:
→ discovered that not like pictures of products you can’t install an external antenna on it as connector is not present on ESP (according at board manufacturer it’s Expressif that is doing some savings… but then don’t list it as a feature of the board…)
→ although it’s listed also it supports an OLED screen, connector doesn’t exist on the board…
→ poor design of the board that prevents to install a large aluminium heatsink on the DAC/amplifier
So far results in Wifi in sendspin mode with MA are not great, very choppy at begin of each track and quite some very short irterruptions during play of music.
Did someone succeeded to get Sendspin to work fine on ESP32 ? or is it still too early ?
There are different revisions and versions of the board, newer one support displays as i remember. Where did u buy it?
I got a louder ESP32 running nicely with sendspin. There is a config on the github for trying it out.
from a local retailer here in Switzerland to avoid long delays and customs. Board is none of the ones showed up on sonocotta website so not sure what happens there
Yeah I did the same, used the code supplied on the github but unable to get a track played properly. I even installed an Ethernet board on it to use it through wired LAN but exact same problem. I have to try it with a radio in MP3.
I start to think it might not be able to handle proper audio files (not compressed and bad quality like MP3). I have only FLAC and OGG files in my music library.
Also based in Switzerland, I have bought my Louder-ESP32S3 boards directly from Tindie and Elecrow, I also have received a couple of different revisions. Having followed the development a bit, you might just have an older version. The maker went through quite some revisions with this project. Probably the local retailer had some of the older ones in stock. Also the external antenna is an option, you either by the internal or external antenna version.
I also run this config, works like a charm. Three of them are running with small bookshelf speakers, supplied by a 12V USB-C to DC Jack cable, the other one is in a custom speaker enclosure for the guest bathroom.
@vincen Do you also use the ESP32S3 variant or are you on the non-S3 one?
S3 is more powerful but does not support Bluetooth Classic (which you probably don’t need when running it with MA/sendspin). I guess because of that, the maker still distributes both variants as certain people want to build a speaker with Bluetooth audio support. I hope this helps.
Yeah I realised there were a lot of versions quite different.
The first one I received was not S3 but I bought 2 other ones from Bastel Garage and these ones are S3 based but I don’t get any chance so far to flash them with ESPHome I have declared the board properly I think but still complains it’s not the proper chip when I try to flash it (I checked with ESPDiscover and it’s well an ESP32-S3 !
How did you declare it if you have the S3 version ?
yep but the only difference with the non S3 is the declaration of the ESP and the GPIO to adapt, I tried it but ESPHome refuses to compile it stating the ESP connected is not the type in the sketch (2026.3.3 build of ESPHome). I tried even to declare it as the specific model that is soldered on the Louder board: freenove_esp32_s3_wroom but same Did also a clean of files in esphome and restarted the app but still the same.
Found out it was a bug in ESPHome Dashboard stating that problem of wrong chip instead of displaying the error of syntax in the yaml
Going to wire the module and see if I have same issue than the Louder non S3, will post results soon
I have declared the board properly I think but still complains it’s not the proper chip when I try to flash it (I checked with ESPDiscover and it’s well an ESP32-S3 !
