Fair enough for this “preview” device, but for the final device release it would be nice not having to add a cinch plug for every single voice device.
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This is THE FINAL device from Nabu Casa for now. What will change and evolve is the software.
Other people might pick up the openly available pcb designs and build other devices based on that.
It’s all in the YouTube video…
FYI, FutureProofHomes has now also announced the final hardware design of their much more advanced ”Satellite1 Dev Kit” (or rather announced a public beta pre-launch with pre-order for their the USA only) so that development board hardware looks fully ready too even if not available to ship as of yet.
As you can see in their video they taken a very different approach by making it modular using a two-board design that seperate the compute board from the voice board, and making it compatible with the Raspberry Pi Zero standard it will be both flexible today and upgradable to other compute boards in the future.
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Okay, not sure if this popped up anywhere else yet, but anyway: coming back to the topic around “switching between internal speaker and 3.5 plug output”. I initially thought that the 3.5mm plug is used in the “oldschool” way, where the signal to the plug by default is connected to the amp for the internal speaker, and only gets disconnected mechanically when a plug is inserted. Luckily enough the VPE uses the same approach as the respeaker_lite: it uses the microphone detection pin of the 3.5mm plug to switch the amp for the internal speaker on and off. The respeaker docs also have the infos how to switch off the plug detection: GitHub - respeaker/ReSpeaker_Lite
The nice thing is that this could technically also be made controllable, via one of the unused gpio pins of the esp and a few parts.
With that it would be possible to use the internal speaker in parallel to the 3.5mm jack, but basically “on demand”, aka: switchable
I didn’t look far enough into the DAC yet, maybe there is also a way to easily switch the signal to the 3.5mm jack on and off, then it should be possible to fully choose which audio-out to use in a given situation without having to plug and unplug the 3.5mm jack: both, only internal, only external, none
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Would probably also be a good idea to make use of that Grove port to connect a relay so can switch off power to the external speaker/reciever when it is not being used.
Maybe a good idea to have a simple way to have a eaxh to use stand-by feature that will power off external speaker/reciever via the Grove port deing for example the night or away mode so external speaker/reciever draw to much power.
I known that having many external speaker/reciever running 24-hours pay day will quickly become expensive in electricity usage.
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