Microphone/Speaker Combo

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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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?

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

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

Thanks for the input, everyone. It is much appreciated. Pretty sure I’m gonna go the Jabra route. :+1:

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!

2 Likes

Hi,

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

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

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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.)

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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.

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.

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

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

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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

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

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