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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

I would love a DIY kit to build my own "smart" speaker (in the sense that it runs some kind of RPi on which I can put my own OS).

Or maybe just find a way to reverse-engineer my Marshall Stanmore, because their software sucks.

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You can get pretty far with the ESP32 Box though the built-in speaker is a bit tinny.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/5835

I've got it working with local inference though some people use it with OpenAI.

LyRa-T devkit from espressif is perfect for that. It has a two-core ESP32, i2s decoders, jack connectors and direct speaker output. https://www.espressif.com/en/products/devkits/esp32-lyrat

Not a 100% sure if this is what you are looking for, but Pimoroni has the Pirate Radio kit. I have one, ended up dropping the guys into a vintage radio housing for extra cool look, but it's pretty easy and customizable since it's powered by an RPi Zero W.

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pirate-radio-pi-zero-w-pr...

Here's my recent blog post on this very subject: http://www.undr.com/understatement/2024/replacing_sonos_due_...

Sweet! Though I know nothing about sound hardware. Do you just buy "dumb" speakers and connect them all to the RPi "somehow" (with this soundcard hat, I assume)?

I wonder how hard it would be for me to just open the Marshall, remove the "electronics", put an RPi there and connect the speaker/buttons...

Also I spent a few minutes reading the volumio website and I still don't really get what they bring. How is volumioOS better than just having a Debian on my RPi and playing sound files?

To be clear, it'a probably Debian underneath the VolumioOS: They offer good web and mobile integration, including album art and searches, with a responsive UI.

Doing that by hand or CLI might be a challenge, but certainly not impossible. Considering you can install and run VolumioOS for free (avoiding all subscription/upgrades) solves most of the 'network' and 'audio' part of your player, gratis. You can use the default headphone audio output on the Raspi - my solution might be overkill.

Yes, I have dumb speakers attached to a dumb amplifier which has one input for the Raspi's RCA outputs. (I do modify the stereo output to mono however)

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