Build Your Own Smart Home Speaker With ESPHome!

We have recently had some exciting news when it comes to music in the smart home; with ESPHome now receiving support for media players meaning we can now flash speakers with ESPHome and have them play music from Home Assistant, along with a new custom integration that helps you play music on your connected speakers! In todays video, I show you how to flash a hackable speaker with ESPHome then show you how to integrate Music Assistant.
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ESP Muse Proto (Int): amzn.to/3tPmDfi
ESP Muse Luxe Speaker (UK): bit.ly/3HQf9OX
ESP Muse Proto: (UK)bit.ly/3HGIBHc
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[@WarpedFlayme]

That power only cable does not belong in the bin! Those are great if you even need to charge devices with untrusted chargers, such as public stations (eg. at the airport).

[@ManfredBartz]

Agreed. Just mark the cable unambigously - maybe with a cable tie or coloured shrink tubing on the device side of the cable.

[@tin2001]

@@ManfredBartz Several charge only cables I've had come with device have had a lightning bolt logo instead of USB... I guess some manufacturers do the right thing.

[@manjerico]

Or use it to power a random raspberry pi inside your rack!

[@cooperised]

Came here to say this! +1.

[@JamieVids76]

bin it

[@PetervanHofwegen]

I very much agree with the merging of the 2 players. both have their own benefits, like music assistant does not support video... I am happy to see this progress though

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Me too!

[@pavolholes]

Me too!

[@streetwiztech5505]

Never really thought of using HA for music.. but it's certainly given me something to think about. great video as always.. and yes I also agree with merging the players.

[@SBarrenecheaF]

Agreed on making Music Assistant a native feature! But I guess end-users would "expect" audio sync by default... Let's see what happens in a year!

[@thewardster99]

Absolutely love this I managed to get the muse speaker off Amazon recently and it's so much better than me running picore on a pi zero w with a usb conference speaker. However, I don't like it when upgrading the firmware and the speaker emits a short loud burst of white noise, twice now I have almost needed a change of underwear, so you have been warned especially if you end up with multiple units over your house be careful when upgrading them!

[@KaidoKurrikoff]

What about TTS announcement on top of ongoing music stream? I think they mentioned improved handling of this in the official Lets get loud announcement, I would have liked to see a demonstration this in your video. What happens when you play Spotify and Hass sends a TTS message on top of that? Does Spotify stream continue after the TTS?

[@ulrar]

Didn't now about music assistant, that looks exactly like what I wished the media browser in HA was. I agree they should merge up, the inability to use Spotify in the default browser has been bugging me for a while. Looks like for now I can replace LMS with music assistant, thanks for the tip !

[@EverythingSmartHome]

No worries, enjoy!

[@JamieVids76]

Very interesting development, I run chromecast audios at the moment but am terrified that they will get switched off. Combining a wifi/bluetooth audio dongle is a good option here too and equalisers etc. I'm not jumping in just yet but will be watching with great interest. I also need Emby integration :)

[@RivaSABB]

Great video especially on the back of the latest updates. Especially good link to Mighty Car Mods

[@laialbert]

That Mighty Car Mods tie in was fantastic!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

IN THE BIN

[@sjwright2]

@@EverythingSmartHome Or the purity box

[@timredd]

Good video Lewis, thanks for the info. Nice project, fairly easy, I'll definitely try this out.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Let me know how it goes 🔥

[@wizdude]

i can't wait to see more ESP32 based hackable speakers to hit the market. The Muse Luxe looks cool, but it's limited stock and not available in my part of the world. I'm sure we'll see more of these come soon! Thanks for a great video :-)

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Thanks, me too!

[@patraff1280]

Plus one for the integration of the two media players. Mate I like the way you explain things without going too in-depth. Well done

[@MrSupersidewinder]

I built a similar setup using old raspberry pi's. Hardwired them to bt speakers, installed kodi 18.9 Leia. They run headless, I control them from Yatse and HA... No microphone, spying👀👍. They can play music from my NAS, and handle TTS announcements. 😁

[@MrCWoodhouse]

Very cool. I just took a ESP32 Wroom dev board ($10) and PCM5102 I2S DAC ($8) and 5 lines of yaml and I have a network media player! Amazing. I bought the Muse Proto board as well ($25) and installed Squeezebox in less than 10 minutes and poof! 3W mono network and bluetooth media speaker! This is a great addition to ESPHome.

[@pavolholes]

Thanks for sharing this info! I was just wondering about DAC and ESP32 and there, you already did that. Question: mono? PCM5102 should be stereo. Or you mentioned that in regards to Muse Proto? Thanks!

[@MrCWoodhouse]

@@pavolholes stereo.

[@jacksystems]

I love your channel, there isn't a question I can ask about Home Assistant that isn't answered here!

[@joelfrojmowicz]

WOW, What an amazing video! Thanks for the tips.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Enjoy! Thanks!

[@verwaeststijn]

just installed it ,works really well and only takes 5 minutes or so to set up thanks !!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

🙏🙏

[@1234andrew1234]

Another great video ❤

[@MarkGhali]

Lewis! excellent! Thank you

[@mawo9239]

Hey Lewis! Have you, by any chance, tried the Muse with Rhasspy? Not sure if it even would work as input device or if the mic is good enough to capture voice from a room?

[@ivlis32]

I really wish I can replace my Google speakers with an open ecosystem but: 1. Controlling music from HA dashboard sucks. It's not designed for that. I wish I could "cast" to homeassistant and then control which speakers are active akin Google speakers groups. 2. Google voice control is irreplaceable. 3. Google speakers are pretty decent for the price. So unless Google drops support to Chromecast audio, I would not switch, I think...

[@panniechristou9644]

great video ! thanks very much , great videos by the way

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Thanks, appreciate it!

[@chancethetechie]

Any thoughts on using this speaker as a local google home or alexa device using some of the home assistant voice integrations?

[@kevinschwerin1324]

Excited to see where this goes!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Me too!

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Nice video Lewis. Thanks!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Thanks man! 🙏

[@jamesderrick8201]

The challenge with the Home Assistant Creator Network is several sources have access to the same information at the same time. Watching the HASS live event, then your take on the same event, then Ronan/Phil, then DrZsss, - you get the issue! 🧐 Your original project-based ideas are good, so more please! I agree that two implementations of audio managers are daft - especially as one focuses on audio quality; the other doesn't even mention mono sound (ESP32 can of course handle a stereo I2S DAC - but the Luxe isn't it, and Matter will take another 6 months). At the moment, a Google Chromecast Audio seems a good buy (while stocks last) as they play reasonable stereo DACs with local support (LAN URLs). It's just a shame HASS USB speakers don't work as easily as original Zach's demo suggested.

[@Iisakkiik]

Nice shirt ahaha, didn't expect to see that here!

[@vodros]

The cherry on top would be the ability to play music on the speaker directly from the native Spotify app. Idk how complicated it is to implement tho.

[@sdfhjklhsfdjdsflhkds]

That would be really nice. The Spotify app has no problem seeing my existing Sonos speakers, so I'm not sure how big a lift that would be.

[@tin2001]

Spotify are quite tight about their software. You have to send them your platform's build tools and they'll insert their code and compile it for you... I suspect there's a cost for that. Hardware (esp32 anyway) should be plenty as far as the hardware, but getting Spotify to support open source stuff would be very difficult (even though they use a load of open source stuff themselves).

[@Daisy_human]

There is an addon in home assistant that lets you turn the host in to a spotify speaker so it might be possible to spoof that and create some virtual ones that connect through home assistant to real devices you already can change the output in configeration

[@virtualizeeverything]

Grate project

[@markverstappen1365]

Multi speaker options or 5.1 would be a perfect addon

[@ericd4mation]

Is there a noticeable delay with these when you try to send audio to it as part of an Automation for example? I had a Google Nest Mini set up to handle this but the 3-4 second delay ended up being too much for what I needed it for (chime on door open). I ended up going for using RTTTL in ESPHome, but having something a bit more "hi-def" would be nice if it could similarly play _immediately_.

[@200501012]

Once you can cast from Spotify (say from a phone) to these not just using HA I'm definitely going to build this.

[@marklewis5460]

loving the MCM merch again!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Haha thanks Mark!

[@chrislambe400]

Nice, I am looking to stream from HA to a esp32 which connects to existing bluetooth speakers (Nobsound ns10g and some Visaton DL 13/2 ES ceiling speakers and Echo dot "Alexa connect to my speaker"- Amazing sounding combo), but I cannot find any info on how to do this with ESPHome ESP32 and Bluetooth A2DP.

[@SB10999]

Agree they should integrate it and only have one media player. Maybe they're just waiting for some tweaks to be worked out? Either way this is exciting! Thanks for sharing this!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Thanks for watching!

[@Bruno-vz8vk]

Anyway thanks a lot for the great video

[@daveharman888]

Can this be used with a "wake command" after this newest HA update or do you have to use an additional mic?

[@rosswhite5014]

i'd love to see a video about integrating esp muse with rhasspy!!

[@jmr]

I don't know if this was fixed but I had an authentication error with Spotify that completely stopped setup of Music Assistant. Fix the authentication error and it will set up correctly. Spotify requires a paid account to use it with Music Assistant.

[@TheSlimHim]

I haven't used music assistant yet but I do wonder if they will use Snapcast at all to help with the sync. Perhaps not the best since it's not like Snapcast can directly talk to all the speakers but maybe they use it for the timings. It does have adjustments. So spinning up a client for each output might be worth it.

[@valshaped]

The developer was talking about syncing multiple players by using their precise timestamp reports, but also that Google/Nest Home speakers and Chromecast devices don't report precise timestamps.

[@Daisy_human]

If they could make a custom notification action that would let you use a notification for andriod and ios that appears when home assistant plays music and lets you pause and play it and shows the cover art because i dont think the capability exists yet

[@woland783]

Music assistant is very cool! Is there any panel you can add to the dashboard to choose which song to play or do you have go through the sidebar panel and choose it from there?

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Don't think it exists...yet!

[@aubreypage1338]

I wonder if this could also be used as a Bluetooth proxy if it is continuously plugged in…I can’t tell if that is in the install from Muse or it would need to be done separately or it can’t be done at all.

[@spiraltamer]

If you use the squeezebox option to enable bkuetooth could this be used to both act as smart speaker, voice assistant and wifi proxy? Or would that make it a bit short on horsepower?

[@rabidturtles359]

As some mentioned, it would be great if there was some type of Google Cast implementation. I would love to have my custom speaker show up under the cast options on my phone or anyone on my network. Does anyone know of another solution? An esp device would be nice, but the little research I've done on creating an audio cast device, it doesn't seem straightforward. Just sucks since Google axed the Chromecast audio which is essentially the functionality I would like.

[@TheSirSpence]

Music Assistant looks great! I hope it gets Audible integration. As that would fix one of my major problems. Can it support Echo speakers? I was about to go out and replace my Google speakers.

[@valshaped]

It supports any media_player device in Home Assistant. You might need a custom integration to get Amazon devices to work, since, if I remember right, their API isn't public. They mentioned it in the recent Home Assistant presentation.

[@gtabrpaulo]

@@valshaped echo devices are not supported...

[@JamesMyatt1]

What zigbee hub/gateway do you use? I assume it's not a usb stick in your HA server.

[@RBHMMX]

Any chance this could replace smart speakers for giving voice commands?

[@JB-fh1bb]

It’s a very difficult problem but there is work being done. Check out Almond for example

[@wapphigh5250]

Is gapless playback, and autoplay to the next track (ie play an entire album) a feature?

[@wouterdehaan5240]

Why does HA not have support for readily available Bluetooth speakers. most of them have a microphone in them now by default. Would be awesome to be able to use them as TTS and STT module. Or am I missing something and is this already a option ?

[@nicsarahnicol9742]

Agree it should be integrated - hopefully it will be by the time I get to the audio side of things -

[@Rich33527]

Could the Muse Proto be used to make a smart speaker assistant similar to Alexa/Google to use in Home Assistant? I see it has a microphone..

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Not yet (I don't think) but hopefully one day, that would be awesome!

[@PM13501]

Very neat! Is it possible to send TTS from HA machine to this speaker?

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Yep it works by default

[@xMasaru96]

I know very little about ESPHome stuff so my question is: How does the speaker connect to my HA instance? Is it Bluetooth? Would I be able to still use it when my internet goes out?

[@hectyre]

I have a great pair of bluetooth speakers I use out in the garden, it'd be great if I could connect those to Home Assistant. Not sure that's possible yet though.

[@MindForgedManacle]

Maybe some BT range extender could help

[@TexasCHLforum]

Do you have any idea if an Amazon Echo or Echo Dot can be converted to use ESP Home? It would have to be gutted and use only the speakers and microphone.

[@mikevieira1]

Great video! Can you make a video on text to talk. I'm trying to get my speakers to say the current outside temperature when triggered. Message: The temperature is {{state_attr('weather.home', 'temperature ')}} degrees. Unfortunately google says exactly what I wrote and not the temperature. Please help....thank you

[@Bruno-vz8vk]

I would also like the same thing with a screen and the possible to play vidéos and make sip calls to interphone 😊👍

[@RafaGmod]

Ok, once i was in doubt if the shirt was a MCM reference, now im sure!! IN THE BIN!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

😂

[@l1233799]

I'm still on the fence as I mainly want get it for Genie/ Almond which requires HA to recognise it as the microphone and speaker. Has anyone got this product and tried to get it working as a voice assistant?

[@RonenLin]

Can i use this Kingston with an m5 echo atom?

[@bastiat691]

Hi man, I bought the muse luxe, but on my machine (latest version of chrome running on ubuntu 22.04, the serial port shows up in the dialog, as well as with lsusb in the terminal), when I try to connect to the serial port through the interface you suggested it throws an error saying "Failed to execute 'open' on 'SerialPort': Failed to open serial port", do you have any ideas what it might be? EDIT: Nevermind, found out what it was, for anybody else who has this problem - I had to add my user to the usergroup called 'dialout', and restart, and then it worked.

[@yorks_atheist3069]

you know I got my hopes up then it was going to be a voice command speaker to replace Alexa, It's the only cloud based thing on my network would love it gone

[@jonathans.8650]

Can I voice control this? I don't want to say something like "Alexa, ask Plex to play "..." Is there any speaker and software to let me play my local music by voice?

[@MrYawAsante]

Is it also possible to use the integrated mic to pass sound to home assistant for things like rhasspy or almond?

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Not yet with ESPHome but you never know in the future! That would be very nice!

[@MindForgedManacle]

@@EverythingSmartHome Ah drat, I was hoping support for the mic was already present. I'll keep an eye on this.

[@Chris21721]

Because this speaker has a mic can it be used for the new voice assistant?

[@RussWolfe313]

Agree they should be merged into the official music player.

[@shatter71]

Nice shout out to Mighty Car Mods with the shirt! :)

[@finki007]

do you know any ceiling speakers that I could do the same?

[@amitdk]

Sir please make a video on squzelite esp32

[@grzehooo88]

Unfortunately Music assistant is not working on HA 2023.02 and later. For me it's crashing on adding integration in HA.

[@moshiko2312]

Wow😮

[@IAmTheParanoia]

I've been unable to load the ESP home firmware from the web client. It stalls at preparing install everytime. Squeezelite works but that's not what I want. Shame it's still broken.

[@taranagnew436]

can you link the "media player with spotify intagration" , can you use any usb light and set the alies to trigger whenever you type a task to do or can you link it with "todoist"?

[@taranagnew436]

and i think he should merge then as one

[@ronverstappen7334]

Aloha! This is off topic, but I can't see where to add my question relevantly. In one of your videos you mentioned that you're not a fan on HA scenes. Coming from an environment where I embraced scenes (Lutron), I'm curious as to your rationale for that comment (it was an aside). I'm getting frustrated with the rigidness and lack of inspectability of the scene in HA but I need a nudge to get over it and look for better ways to go about similar goals. Maybe a topic for a new video? Cheers!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Hey Ron! Hmm it's a good discussion - jump in the discord server and I'm sure we can discuss it, easier than KZbin comments! 😅

[@devhammer]

Having great difficulty getting a Muse Proto board working correctly, either with ESPHome or with Squeezelite-ESP32 firmware. I think the issue is that I'm using DuckDNS and Let's Encrypt for a secure external endpoint. If I disable SSL and access HA via the internal URL, I can get media to play using the Squeezelite-ESP32 firmware. Unfortunately, with the ESPHome firmware for the Muse Proto, I haven't been able to get it to work at all. This is using the built-in media player, both with a local MP3 file and TTS. I have to believe there is a supported way to play audio over an SSL connection.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

SSL works perfectly well :) just make sure you have setup as per my duckdns video and you should be OK - don't forget to to the dnsmasq steps

[@devhammer]

@@EverythingSmartHome Thank you for the reply! It may be that the dnsmasq steps are what I'm missing. BTW - thank you for the video on controlling LED strips...been controlling addressable LEDs for many moons with everything from Arduino to .NET Micro Framework, and can't express how much better it is to just use WLED. I've done ESP8266-based boards, and purchased some QuinLED boards as well. Such a nice solution!

[@devhammer]

@@EverythingSmartHome Sadly, appears that DNS may not have been my issue. NAT loopback seems to work fine, but just for completeness' sake, I added a DNS rewrite in AdGuard Home to point my duckdns domain name to my internal IP address. nslookup on my duckdns domain correctly returns the internal IP address. I can play local media and tts to my browser, as well as to an XBOX on my network, but attempting to play local media (MP3) or TTS to the Muse Proto results in the error message: "Failed to call service media_player/play_media. Player does not support HTTPS." Interestingly, some stations from the radio browser DO play through the Muse Proto (hadn't tested that), though others also give the error "Player does not support HTTPS".

[@devhammer]

Appears that any station stream with an HTTP URL works fine, while HTTPS-based streams fail with the error. So, I'm guessing if I could get the TTS and local media served on HTTP vs. HTTPS, it would work.

[@JohnMayfield-NS]

How hard would it be to add a mic to the speaker? I only caught part of the live stream and I don't think one is built in.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

It has a mic but no software support yet, would be amazing if it could be added at some point

[@JohnMayfield-NS]

@@EverythingSmartHome ah okay! Explains why it wasn't mentioned/mentioned much. Would be pretty much the last thing needed to be an independent smart speaker without using Google/Alexa. Just have to hook it in to something like mycroft or maybe Genie (formally almond)

[@Jeroen_a]

@1:48....Why toss it in the bin? If you have a project that only requires power (like the speaker or an already programmed ESP) you can still use it.... just mark the cable with a marker or a tag that it only powers and does no data.

[@youdontneedmyrealname]

You can't connect to hidden networks with the muse luxe? wtf?

[@alanpaone]

its open source sonos, which is good and bad for the same reasons, when i used Sonos i hated that you always had to close your music app and open the speakers's app to play music in a much worse UI that didn't work as well and isn't integrated into the ui the way airplay/CC are. expanding my House app to do more stuff sorta resolves half of the problem, but won't be as good (for me at least) as reverse engineering the proprietary protocols i already use. and man, that proto board just doesn't seem like they are envisioning the same thing i am. it'd be nice to see a version with no mics and a stereo output, but I wonder how good an esp32 even is for audio quality. it seems like a good starting point for an open echo dot, which is maybe what people want? I probably won't use any of this yet, but I'll definitely be paying attention

[@tin2001]

Bit banging GPIO pins can get you stereo 8 bit 22khz just fine. But the ESP32 also has i2s support. That allows for 16 bit, 44khz, stereo audio in a single stream. The ESP32 specs say it can do 32 bit aswell, but I think the sample rate is reduced if you do that - not sure. So basically you can get some audio out of the chip with no extra components (other than amplified speakers), or CD quality audio with an I2S board.

[@alanpaone]

@@tin2001 interesting, might have to play around with it

[@nedevski]

5:24 ah, the "Music Ass" integration

[@NoName-wy4hf]

Just got mine. I can play one, maybe two things before it becomes unresponsive. Home assistant still sees it however the sensor states are incorrect. Anyone else encounter this?

[@jvgorkum]

I hope they will add support for install with more secure browsers then chrome based browser...

[@EverythingSmartHome]

It's actually the other way around, other browsers don't support web serial API. Of the browser supports web serial API you should be able to use this..

[@jvgorkum]

@@EverythingSmartHome chrome != secure

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Where did I say it is or isn't?

[@iwillalwasecomelast]

MCM merch... nice!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

CHOPPED ✌️

[@jimsupra69]

nice shirt

[@subthousandoaks]

As one!!

[@kylebrown1739]

I'm getting the error " Sorry, text to speech can only be called with the notify.alexa_media service, please check the alexa media player wiki" Any thoughts onb how to fix this?

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Text to speech does not work with Alexa media player and music assistant does not support Alexa media player either - I think this is due to a limitation Amazon puts in place from what I understand but could be wrong

[@kylebrown1739]

@@EverythingSmartHome Any work around then? Doesn't seem like I can play Music Assistant through any Alexa media players if that's the case.

[@HungarianManbeast]

I was hoping a build video, instead I've got an advertisement

[@harambeduck4110]

so far to your dreams... since 2023.3 they are working on V2 which is then not integrated into Home Assistant (besides the access via the side bar) since it's running as HA AddOn...

[@brianh.4185]

A shame that this speaker can’t be AC powered.

[@Bigglare]

I hacked a 60 year old console phonograph with an echo dot airport express. Using that stand alone board might be cool. need to find a new console.

[@TwanJaarsveld1]

Its truly sad that it's micro usb only

[@pep2k8]

automagically!!

[@_Miner]

Give me just the tip.......... wait a minute

[@MarcoRagonesi]

Please add a mic and then develop Ada

[@G4Disco]

MCM fan spotted.

[@TerraMagnus]

Sadly the hardware seems to be made of unobtanium.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Hopefully it's back soon!

[@harrydawso]

wow I'm first

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Haha nice! 🤜🤛

[@woojtekk]

nothing creative - only few click on brand new devices and ready. Unfortunately since few last video I am very disappointing form this channel !