Ive gotten myself a little conference speaker + mic combo to use with rhasspy to give my HA installation some ears and a mouth.
The speaker has a power draw of 2A itself and the RPi3+ that I use runs on a 2.5A PSU.
This seems like there is not much overhead and I wonder if I either underpower the speaker or worse get the RPi in power trouble.
I say all this because I recently had issues with a weaker PSU (without the speaker) and always got underpower issues that manifested in the RPi restarting and then not correctly booting.
Yesterday when I plugged in the speaker for the first time, I got the same botched reboot I experienced before.
So I wonder if I should get a conference speaker that is seperatly powered. (Although those hard hard to find/ way more expensive).
I think you could DIY a solution for it by cutting the cable and rerouting the black and red to an external power supply and leaving the data for the Pi.
Just make sure you test on a spare cable just in case it does not work.
Although I wonder if I havent overlooked anything. there was a recent YT video by “everything smart home” that used a very similar speaker and he never mentioned any power concerns. Or maybe a RPi4 has better power management.
I also plan on outsourcing the speaker to a seperate RPi, that way I at least dont compromise my main RPi where HA is running.
But still, it feels a bit weird to get these issues. There are more tutorials that also use these conference speakers so there would have been a mention if there were power issues.
e.g. this thread also discussed 2 conference speakers Microphone/Speaker Combo - Hardware - Rhasspy Voice Assistant
Nope. A Pi4b 8 with an SSD attached can be borderline for what a generic 5v 2a USB can provide reliably. So add just one or two high draw devices and… Poof.
Id go with the previous suggestion - figure out how to power the device separately.
Makes sense with the SSD, I wonder if the HA yellow etc are better equiped to handle more external devices.
In the mean time I looked for cables with power and signal split but there are only PoE cables that can do that.
But a externally powered USB hub could probably be a less “hacky” and cheaper alternative…