Bring Home Assistant to a Google Home Mini with this $85 drop-in board (open hardware)

The Google Home Mini (1st-gen) is a small smart speaker that launched in 2017 as an inexpensive internet-connected device that let you talk to Google Assistant to get answers to questions, save task and timers, play music, and more. But what if you don’t want a device that sends your voice queries to Google sitting in your home?

Enter the MiciMike Home Mini Drop-in Board. It’s a drop-in replacement for the original Google Home Mini printed circuit board that fits inside the case and works with the same speaker hardware. But instead of relying on Google’s cloud services, it’s designed to use the open source Home Assistant platform.

The board is up for pre-order for $85 through a Crowd Supply crowdfunding campaign, and the design is open source, which means you can inspect it and/or build your own (although I suspect you’d end up spending even more to do that).

The board features an ESP32-S3 primary processor with support for WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0. There’s also a XMOS XU316 dedicated audio processor. And there are two built-in microphones and support for noise suppression and echo cancellation.

It comes with Home Assistant pre-installed, along with support for some basic features including on-device wake work detection and Music Assistant (for playing music). There’s also Snapcast and Sendspin integration for multi-room audio synchronization.

Installing the board basically means ripping out the original Google Home Mini PCB and replacing it with a new one, so if you don’t already have a Google Home Mini, you’d probably be better off setting up Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer – the developer of the MiciMik Home Mini Drop-in Board even notes that there are some cheaper all-in-one solutions available like the HA Voice PE ($59) and Sattlite1 ($70).

But for folks who have an old Google Home Mini lying around who want more control over the software running on the device (or who are tired of waiting for Google to end support), this does look like a pretty nifty solution for breathing new life into an older device… or at least the shell (and speaker) of an old device.

via CNX Software