After some thought and brief discussion with mod, I’m posting here about about a potential UK based group buy of the Onju Voice assembled PCB from PCBWay.
So first some disclaimers for you to note and understand;
This is a private group buy and not in any way endorsed or warranted by Home Assistant or Nabu Casa.
I am not the designer or maintainer of Onju Voice.
I have no affiliation with PCBWay.
This is for UK addresses only.
Is that enough of a get out for me do you think, or do I need more?
So, I’m proposing that I gather sufficient funds to make a group purchase of assembled PCBs, place an order with PCBWay and then distribute the assembled PCBs to the group.
So my initial ask is who in the UK would potentially like one or more of these? No money yet and I’m not holding anyone to their initial response. Once i get an idea of quantity I’ll make a more formal request from PCBWay for costs and we’ll see where we go from there.
Quality is fine. Not as good as PCBWay and OSHPark but perfectly usable. e.g pad to solder mask registration tolerance is ever so slightly worse but not so bad that it impedes soldering in any way.
I would be willing to do 3.
1st for initial testing that i inevitably will break.
2nd that i hopefully will get working.
3rd as a backup in case i suck more than i thought i did and break the 2nd.
For the benefit of others who haven’t heard of the Onju Voice replacement guts for a Google Nest Mini (2nd gen) and were about to use a search engine… :
Yeah I’d probably be interested in a couple - like others I looked at them previously but only needing 2 or 3 it’s not really viable to do an order by myself.
I wonder how it would work out price wise getting the bare PCBs with a solder stencil from somewhere like jlcpcb and sourcing the components separately?
@swifty I had brief look at sourcing the PCB and components seperately and for me it’s not worth the saving. Several people have already posted that they’ve sourced from PCBWAY, so just on track record they’re my first choice. There’s no reason why I couldn’t order more PCBs than complete assemblies if that was of interest?
I’ve had a brief look at other sources for complete assemblies other than PCBWAY and there are a few more options, some even in the UK, I’ll dig further into costs later, if there’s enough interest for a group buy.
Sorry people, been distracted this last few weeks with a close family funeral. Getting back to “normal” next week and I’ll get a price from PCBWay and JLCPCB.
@itnassol Out of interest, did you get yours from PCBWay? Did you have any issues with the purchasing, fitting the PCB into the Google Home/Mini or flashing with ESPHome?
No not really ,they took a couple of weeks to get here but arrived well packaged. I have used 4 so far with no issues, at the moment I am testing some new code that lets you use them as speakers as well as voice assistants, I will let you know how it goes. Just waiting for a couple of old minis from eBay to put them in. The 2 I have up and running actually in minis work so well, the mini is a surprisingly good speaker.
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