HOW TO - Replace Google For an ESP32 (Onju Voice)

[Music] a few weeks ago I shared a really cool local Voice Assistant project that allowed you to switch out the PCB from a NES Mini 2 in exchange for a board that has an ESP 32 and works directly with home assistant and ESP home and in today's video I'm going to be answering some of the most common questions from that video and walking you through the full setup and installation process before we get started it is worth mentioning that this project is still in development so potentially in the future the PCB design could change and also the code could change and while the code can be changed by you with the PCB you'd have to either modify it yourself or buy a brand new PCB this project is a great little project and what makes it really cool is the fact that everything gets housed inside of the NES mini you can make use of the volume and touch controls and you can also reuse the Google Power G cable if this is your first local Voice Assistant project I would recommend checking out some of the alternative options like the atom echo or the esp32 S3 box 3 which is such a mouthful but these other projects are easier to source and they're much cheaper however if you've got the time patience and a little bit of money then this again is a great project to have a play with the first thing that you'll need for this project is obviously a NES Mini 2 in the previous video a lot of people asked me whether this could be done with the NES min one or even the Amazon Echo and the answer for that is pretty much straight up no the reason for this is because this PCB has been designed specifically for the NES Mini 2 and it's designed as a dropin replacement so you take the old board out you put the new board in and it fits and everything works as it should personally I'm an Amazon Echo user and I have these dotted around all over my house and I'd love to see something like this created for an Amazon Echo and if anybody in the community wants to create it or share it then I'll gladly be checking out and sharing it with you guys for this project I picked up a couple of secondhand units from eBay for around 2020 if you are picking them up secondhand I'd definitely recommend testing them first just to ensure all the features and functionality are working as expected I did have one secondhand unit that had a really dodgy speaker and I didn't realize this until after IID actually swapped the board and then had to test it with the Google board just to confirm it was the speaker's fault once you've sourced your NES Mini 2 you'll also need to pick up the Ono voice board which you can get directly from pcbway who are also the sponsor of today's video pcbway is your One-Stop shop for CNC 3D printing PCB design and assembly and much much more if you've got a smart home sensor Gadget or idea that you want to see brought to life just like the onu voice board then head over to PCB way.com and get started today using the link in the description it will take you to the PCB way page for the on voice project and from here you'll actually be able to order the PC pcbs it's worth noting that when you place an order the minimum number of pcbs that can be ordered is five so I would suggest maybe getting some buddies involved and all of you getting this together on the previous video lots of people teamed up and they made a big order together so that might be something you want to do maybe check out the markot tech Discord or Facebook group and maybe find some people that want to share this with you with ordering you've got two different choices you've got the choice of only the PCB which is just the blank board and you'll need to put all the comp ons on yourself or you've then got the PCB and assembly so this is totally up to you obviously the assembly costs but you do get all the parts added on for you for the boards that I'm using I opted for the PCB and assembly but again this is going to be totally up to you once you're happy with your selection go ahead and press add to cart and you'll then be presented with another box that will allow you to customize the build and make changes to the manufacturing process and properties some of these changes that you make may affect the Bild time and also increase the price but again for me I left all of these as the standard options and just submitted the order once you've placed an order you'll receive regular updates and information from PCB way and they'll keep you updated on the progress right the way from manufacturing all the way to delivery it's a very fluid process and this was one of my first experiences with using PCB way and I'll definitely be returning for future orders so at this point you should now have your nest Mini 2 your onto voice board pcbs and also a workin and access ible version of Home assistant that also has ESP home installed just because I'm not going to be running through the setup and installation of those things so if you do have those things you're going to be good to get started we'll start with a nice and easy step which just involves adding a couple of add-ons to home assistant the first add-on that we're going to add is Piper and we can find this by opening up the add-ons clicking the add-on store and just entering Piper with Piper installed we're going to leave the configuration set to its defaults but we're going to want to make sure that that start on boot is ticked and also watch dog we can then just start the add-on the next add-on is going to be whisper so again just press addon store enter whisper and click install with whisper open its configuration there are a couple of different options that you can modify and these modifications are all going to be Hardware dependent you've got the option of changing models which are used in transcription the smaller models like tiny intake are going to run faster on smaller Hardware things like Raspberry Pi 4S but they're going to be a bit less accurate if You' got some stronger Hardware you could make use of bass or you could make use of the medium intake which is one of the larger ones for this demonstration I'm using home assistant that's running on a dedicated Mini PC and it's got plenty of power to run all of these models but for this demo I'm making use of the base model with your options all set head back to the info Tab and you want to also make sure that start on boot and Watch Dog are also enabled and then start the add-on the third and final ad add-on that we're going to be using is open wake word so for the last time press the add-on store search for open wake word and click install with this one installed we're also going to be just using the default settings so just ensure that start on boot is enabled and also watch dog and click Start on the add-on to complete the installation of the add-ons head into your home assistant Integrations and select configure on each of the three Integrations that should have been autois discovered by home assistant with all of our add-ons installed we can now flash our PCB to do this we're going to need a micro USB to USB a cable if we take our new PCB out of the antistatic bag we'll see that there's a small black cap which is covering the micro USB port on the bottom of the board you'll see that there's two buttons one is labeled as Boot and one is labeled as reset we're now going to take our USB cable and we're going to plug the USB a end into our computer and pressing and holding the boot Button we're going to insert the micro USB cable into the board with the board connected to our PC we can now open up ESP home when I'm accessing ESP home I'm making use of Google Chrome and I'm using a https connection which will give me full access to ESB home's web tools if you don't have access via https to your espb home then you can still follow this install but rather than connecting the device to your computer you'll instead need to plug the board into whatever device that you'll running ESP home on with ESP home now open we're going to need to create a new device so select new device this will then ask you for a device name and the Wi-Fi credentials for the purpose of this video I'm just going to call M on- voice but you can call this whatever you want once you've entered your Wi-Fi credentials press the next button and it will present you with a list of different device presets the preset that we're going to use is the ESP 32- S3 so select that one it's now going to give us the option to flash the default firmware but rather than doing this now we're going to instead press skip we should now see this device that we've created offline and in ESP home and if you select edit it will take you into the Bare Bones config for this in that config you should be able to see your encryption key and we're going to need to copy this and paste it into something like notepad as we'll need it in just a second once you've got that encryption key copied somewhere else we're going to select everything that's in the config and just delete it all we can now open up my onu voice code which is linked in the description below and we can copy all of that and paste it in here if you're on Windows if you press contrl and F you can search the config and the term that we need to search for is called change me this should jump you down to the line in the code that has the word change me in it and we'll need to now copy our encryption key from the notepad and paste it over the top of change me there is an additional part of this config that you can change if you want to and it's the access point password so you can scroll back up to the top and I just have it set as password but you can change this to something more secure if you wish with that all done we can now go ahead and press save and we can click install selecting install will present you with a list of different installation options as I'm making use of https I can press the plug into this computer as the option but again if you don't have that https connection you can make use of the option below which is to plug the board into the machine that ESP home's running on once you select your option the installation process will begin in and it should just take a couple of minutes to actually run through the whole process once it's completed you'll be prompted by ESP home letting you know that it's all finished you can then unplug the board from your PC if you give the board a couple of seconds and then plug it back in it should start booting to that newly flashed firmware and after a minute or so the LEDs on the front of it should all flash green indicating that it's connected to our Wi-Fi if we look back in ESP home we should also see that the device is now online and visible indicating that our board has been successfully flashed and is accessible next comes the fun part which is the tear down of the nest mini you'll need to start by removing the lockin screw and to do this you just need to lift up the rubber tab on the back of the device which will reveal that lockin screw with the screw removed you can then just twist the mini and it should lock into place and once it does you can carefully pry the device open and when I say carefully it's because directly opposite that lockin screw hole is a ribbon cable which is used for power and you don't want accidentally pry through this with the device now open we've got these two sections which are the top half and bottom and the bottom is only held on by this ribbon cable so we can safely remove this by just lifting up the tab connector and gently pulling the ribbon cable out putting the bottom of the case to one side we can now just focus on this main top half and the next thing we need to do is to remove the speaker which is held in by four screws removing the four screws will detach the speaker which is also held in by just just one small connector and we can gently pull this out to disconnect the speaker totally from the top half on some of the units that I've tested out this connector can be really stiff so you may need to apply a little bit of force but just be careful not to apply too much and damage the cable or the connector now that both the bottom case and the speaker have been removed we've just got this top section which houses the PCB and its controls in order to actually access the PCB we need to remove the covering plate which is also held in by screws so let's remove these five screws with those five screws removed we can now lift up the covering plate to reveal the nest mini PCB on the nest mini PCB you'll see that we've still got this ribbon cable attached so we can remove this from the nest and we can attach this to the corresponding point on our brand new onu board when you attach the ribbon cable to the onu board you want to take a couple of minutes here just to Ure that that cable is in correctly and that it's firmly attached because it's an absolute pain in the butt to have to keep this assembling this thing and checking all of the cables and connections the ribbon cable is the only part of the Google board that we're going to be taking and reuse in and you'll be happy to hear that there's no more screws holding the PCB in place so let's remove Google I found that the easiest method for doing this was to remove a section of the foil and then just gently lift it from one side the board's only held in place by a few small adhesive rings and as you lift it from one side you'll start to hear them slowly peel to stick the new board in place you can try and reuse the adhesive rings that I found on the back of the Google board but I have failed at removing these on the few times that I've tried doing it and I'm often just left with sticky Globs which actually still work at sticking the board in place alternatively you can just forget about them as the board won't wiggle around too much unless you plan on using your mini as a Maraca another section that's on the Google board that you can try and remove and reuse is the LED divider this little little divider helps divide the LEDs up so that when it's shining through the top of the case they don't over reflect and blur into each other but in a test where I've actually removed the divider and placed it on another board I haven't really found any difference so I don't really think it's worth it it's also quite hard to remove and it's made out of a weird foamy material so just like with the adhesive Rings this one's totally up to you because the onw board is a direct replacement as long as you've got all of those cables and connectors all pushed into the correct points and everything's makinging contact the board should just work however before you do a full reassembly I would highly recommend that you just test the components by plugging them into each other before screwing it all in place because as I said this is a right pain to have to take everything apart just to check that our cable is pushed all the way in with our new onw board now in place we basically just need to run through the steps that we previously went through but in revers in order to get the device back together we'll start by adding the covering plate on the back of your covering plate there might be a little bit of thermal paste and you can just scrape this off and wipe it down before putting that plate back on top you can then add in the five screws and add the speaker connector you can put the speaker back on top add in the four screws connect the ribbon cable and then attach the back plate and then finally add that locking screw for the final step we're going to just jump back into home assistant where we need to set up a voice assistant and utilize the open wake word to do this press settings voice assistant and then add assistant I'm going to call my assistant on you voice but again you can call this whatever you want we then need to fill in the voice assistant options and these options are going to be based on your region and your voice preferences as I'm a home assistant Cloud subscriber I'm going to be using home assistant Cloud as my options for speech to text I'm going to choose to use faster whisper for Wake word select open wake word and then choose your preferred wake word it is possible to now create your own custom wake word but I'm not going to be showing that in this video so for now I'm just going to be using the default okay Nabu with the voice assistant options all configured we can press save and then we can plug the nest mini in using the Google cable our device should be automatically discovered by home assistant and we should be able to configure it using the ESP home integration if we select the device in the ESP home integration it will give us access to a few different controls sensors and configuration inside of the configuration you're going to choose which assist pipeline you're going to use and the one that we're going to be using is that newly created voice assistant so in my case it's the onu voice with that last option change that's now all of the setup and configuration all done and you should now be able to start issuing voice commands and controlling your devices with your voice you can check which of your devices and entities are exposed by heading back into the voice assistant and selecting exposed at the top you can then choose to either expose more devices or if you don't want to expose a particular thing you can also remove it from here using your voice you should now be able to start making use of that wake word that you set so in my case it was okay naoo and I can start doing things like this okay Nabu is the office light on no off and things like this okay Naboo turn off the hyper Cube Nano turned off light okay Naboo turn off the office light turned off switch and there we go guys that's been a quick look at how to switch out the PCB from The Nest mini to the brand new onju voice board if there's a particular feature or some additional things that you'd like to see covered about this project in a future video then be sure to let me know what they are in the comments below if you've enjoyed this video and found it useful then don't forget to drop me a like and if you're not already hit that subscribe button and ding-dong the notification Bell and you'll be alerted to any future videos that I do as always a massive thank you to these awesome dudes these awesome dudes are my patreons and also my YouTube members and if you want to be one of these awesome dudes and help support my channel which in turn allows me to create content like this then you'll find links to all the places that you can go to support me all in the description below thank you for watching and I'll catch you in the next one cheers

Channel: Mark Watt Tech

Views: 53,729

Keywords: MarkWattTech, HomeAssistant, Hassio, Home Assistant, Smart Tech, Smart Home, Mark Watt, Automations, Home Asistant

Id: xQqhqGd14YY

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 24 2023