Microphone/Speaker Combo

x2012x · April 23, 2021, 12:45am

Is anyone successfully using one of the below microphone/speaker combo units with Rhasspy running on a Pi 4? Looking for some guidance before I spend the money on one of these units.

Jabra Speak 410 or 510
Anker PowerConf S3

I’d prefer a combo unit to save space but my fallback plan is to use a ReSpeaker USB Mic Array in conjunction with a speaker attached to the AUX port.

I searched the forums a bit and it seems like the experience with these combo units varies. If anyone is successfully using one of them, I’d love to know.

Thanks!

grizewald · April 23, 2021, 9:25am

I can’t speak for the two units you mention, but I have good results with a ReSpeaker 4 microphone Pi hat on the RPi 4. For audio output, I use a small 40mm speaker with a PAM8302 amplifier board which I mounted in a 3D printed case.

The input to the amplifier is the output from the 3.5mm jack with two 10K resistors mixing the left and right channels into a mono channel. This gives perfectly clear voice responses to my voice commands.

The benefit of the hat is that you can use the LEDs for visual feedback.

JGKK · April 23, 2021, 11:19am

I can also recommend the

You dont even need the resistors necessarily. You can downmix the stereo to mono on one channel in the asound config in software and than just connect the pam amp to that channel of the 3.5 mm output. Something like:

pcm.!default {
    type asym
    playback.pcm "speaker"
    capture.pcm "mic"
}

pcm.speaker {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "dmixspeaker"
    ttable {
        0.1 1
        1.1 1 
    }
}

pcm.dmixspeaker {
    type dmix
    ipc_key 555555
    slave.pcm "hw:Headphones"
}

For the output part in your asound.conf

manju-rn · April 23, 2021, 11:57am

The PS Eye (via USB) with JBL GO (via jack)

JGKK · April 23, 2021, 12:02pm

I would really discourage buying the pseye if you don’t already own one. It not that great and the drivers for linux are kind of a hack.
You dont actually use the array of microphones but just one mono channel.
All the array magic like beam forming was proprietary and happening on the playstation.
So for getting just a single usb mic basically without leds or speakers its not that great of a deal.
Id rather get one of the usb conference mics as they at least dont have that webcam look.

CrankyCoder · April 23, 2021, 5:54pm

Im curious on that 410 and the 510… when you plug those in via usb, will they show up as just mic and speaker? or will you have to press the button to get the mic to activate since they are designed for speaker phone?

urbatecte · April 23, 2021, 8:57pm

My JABRA510 just work out of the box.
Mic and speaker are directly recocgnize by Rhasspy.
No need to press any button

FredTheFrog · April 24, 2021, 12:39am

I use Jabra units for all three of my Rhasspy listeners. They’re reliable, and high-quality.

x2012x · April 24, 2021, 1:27am

Thanks for the input, everyone. It is much appreciated. Pretty sure I’m gonna go the Jabra route.

grizewald · April 26, 2021, 5:11pm

I hadn’t thought of mixing to mono in the sound config.

It was certainly a fun challenge fitting two SMD 10K resistors inside the connector itself!

kaykoch · April 27, 2021, 1:57pm

Hi,

How do you bring the Power to the PAM8302, when ReSpeaker is on Raspi. Just soldering, or is it a trick?

JGKK · April 27, 2021, 3:04pm

the respeakers expose vcc/ground and a gpio in one of the white connectors (grove interfaces) on the boards.

grizewald · April 27, 2021, 4:58pm

I used an old USB cable, as it has four conductors and a nice noise killing ferrite ring on it. Cut the ends off and wired one pair of conductors to audio ground and my mono signal and then soldered the other pair to +5V and ground on the GPIO header to power the PAM8302. (I needed some extensions to raise the GPIO header up so that I could add the ReSpeaker hat without fouling the metal of my passive cooler case for the Pi and that left plenty of room to solder two wires to the GPIO pins.)

openhabgs · April 28, 2021, 7:18pm

Hi,
I am using a Raspi 3B+ with a ReSpeaker 4MicArray, speaker (with amplifier) attached to the AUX port - it works withoun any problems. Speech recognition including wakeword is very sensitive and precise.
Would be my recommendation.

kaykoch · April 29, 2021, 12:29pm

Thanks for all,
I would like to have a “ALL-IN_ONE” solution, like the versions with ReSpeaker2 and a small speaker. But for that, I need an amp. I was thinking about PAM8302 before, but had the Problem with powering.
USB Power is an option. But would increase the case because of the plug.
Thanks to JGKK. I didn’t think about the grove interfaces. I hope 3.3V is enough for the amp.

JGKK · April 29, 2021, 1:36pm

The pam8302a works fine with 3.3v its rated for 2.5-5V

x2012x · May 14, 2021, 4:19pm

Thanks again for all of the input. I ended up getting a Jabra 510 and it has been working great!

mike · July 13, 2021, 7:41pm

Hi I have just got a Jabra 410 and the mic worked “out of the box” but I am struggling with the USB audio. I have changed the alsa default to 1, I have disabled the analogue output. Tested the speaker by playing white noise. but the Rhasspy refuses to play audio via USB. It is new install on a pi4 with Buster and the standard Docker install of Rhasspy. I am clearly missing the critical point. The log shows:
[ERROR:337169] APlayAudioPlayer: on_receive when I try the Wakeword button to get a tone…
Any suggestions welcome???
Thanks

Bozor · July 13, 2021, 10:30pm

What is aplay -l showing? Is the audio output working with speaker-test?

mike · July 14, 2021, 7:02am

Thanks for the response:
play -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 1: USB [Jabra SPEAK 410 USB], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

speaker-test 1.1.8

Playback device is default
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 1 channels
Using 16 octaves of pink noise
Channels count (1) not available for playbacks: Invalid argument
Setting of hwparams failed: Invalid argument

looks like a problem somewhere? where do I look?
Thanks again

mike · July 14, 2021, 7:21am

Hi so now sorted speaker test by:

create /etc/asound.conf with following:
defaults.pcm.card 1
defaults.ctl.card 1
Replace “1” with number of your card determined above.

that gave me white noise and

Playback device is default
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 1 channels
Using 16 octaves of pink noise
Rate set to 48000Hz (requested 48000Hz)
Buffer size range from 2048 to 16384
Period size range from 1024 to 1024
Using max buffer size 16384
Periods = 4
was set period_size = 1024
was set buffer_size = 16384
0 - Front Left

BUT pressing WAKE to generate a tone gave me a log:
[ERROR:589950] APlayAudioPlayer: on_receive
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/share/rhasspy/rhasspy/actor.py”, line 175, in on_receive
self._state_method(message, sender)
File “/usr/share/rhasspy/rhasspy/audio_player.py”, line 67, in in_started
self.play_file(message.wav_path)
File “/usr/share/rhasspy/rhasspy/audio_player.py”, line 90, in play_file
subprocess.run(aplay_cmd, check=True)
File “/usr/lib/python3.7/subprocess.py”, line 512, in run
output=stdout, stderr=stderr)
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command ‘[‘aplay’, ‘-q’, ‘/usr/share/rhasspy/etc/wav/beep_error.wav’]’ returned non-zero exit status 1.
[INFO:589932] quart.serving: 192.168.1.114:51654 POST /api/listen-for-command 1.1 200 139 14834859
[DEBUG:589896] APlayAudioPlayer: [‘aplay’, ‘-q’, ‘/usr/share/rhasspy/etc/wav/beep_error.wav’]

any thoughts?

Bozor · July 14, 2021, 12:48pm

Did you include /dev/snd in your docker run command?

Could you run docker exec -it rhasspy bash (as long as your rhasspy container is called rhasspy, otherwise substitute rhasspy with your corresponding container name) and then run aplay -l? What’s the output of the command?

mike · July 14, 2021, 12:53pm

I ran the documented load script:

$ docker run -d -p 12101:12101
–name rhasspy
–restart unless-stopped
-v “$HOME/.config/rhasspy/profiles:/profiles”
-v “/etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro”
–device /dev/snd:/dev/snd
rhasspy/rhasspy
–user-profiles /profiles
–profile en

pi@RedPi4:~ $ docker exec -it rhasspy bash
Error: No such container: rhasspy

pi@RedPi4:~ $ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 1: USB [Jabra SPEAK 410 USB], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Bozor · July 14, 2021, 12:57pm

Weird that there is no container. Is rhasspy running? On the host sound is working now you said. Isn’t it? Could you please post some screenshots of your audio record and audio playing section of the rhasspy settings page.

mike · July 14, 2021, 1:02pm

rhasspy is running, quite happy to record “what time is it”, just no sound out of the USB, it did play via headphone jack until I disabled analogue and changed default device…

Bozor · July 14, 2021, 1:59pm

Which devices are there available in the audio playing section? Did you try playing around with different devices in this list? Are you using a 2.4 version of rhasspy on purpose? Otherwise I would recommend an update to version 2.5.10 (latest stable release). Maybe the update will solve the issue as well.

mike · July 14, 2021, 2:52pm

Hi thanks for your time, its weird, all the s/w was fresh loaded yesterday. I think I will try a fresh rebuild. The audio list won’t let me select anything other than default… who knows what I might have twiddled along the way. so a fresh start is called for. Thanks again… I will report if it works, or not…

mike · July 15, 2021, 6:01pm

Thanks again for the help, I reloaded and it all sprang into life, must have been a missed line somewhere. No problems at all… now running 2.5.11…

NephtonLabs · August 29, 2022, 9:02pm

For the sake of the algorithm: Anker PowerConf S330 does not work. Speaker is fine. Microphone array doesn’t pick up any sound in Linux. No idea what it’s problem is, but I’m sending it back.

Sungod3000 · September 20, 2022, 10:13am

I just bought a PowerConf S3 and I wonder if it might be draining too much power from the RPi.

i cant fully put my finger on it, but i had some boot isse once I plugged the speaker in that are a but similar to when I had a weak PSU on my RPi

The Rpi runs on 2.5A and the speaker has a rated draw of 2A

has someone had power issues with these speakers?