Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers

I'm half surprised they are still around as they seem to never restock most of their products, and half pleased they are still around and releasing products.

I really wish someone would come out with a $25 "box" that sits on top of my bookshelf speaker that allows me to Airplay to it and power said speaker with a ~50w class-D amp. Then if I have multiple ones, it would allow them to pair and setup stereo or surround sound. I might even pay $50 for it. Kinda like a Sonos Amp but not at that price point.

I’ll wait for the reviews. I bought the Home Assistant Voice Preview device and it was underwhelming. Bad speaker, bad mic, bad pickup. I really wanted to like it but my Echo blew it out of the water. I’m deep into the HA system so I cannot wait for Echo-quality that I can attach to my HA.

> With just 32 MiB of embedded pSRAM memory and 16 MiB of flash, and 128 KiB ROM storage, the specs may sound meagre – although in the current AI climate, generous – but this is an embedded device not a full-blown PC hiding in an aroma diffuser1. It somewhat reminds me of the PineCube, which had 128MB DDR3. Once the Linux tax was paid it was basically unusable. > Factory shipped firmware is open-source and provides Wyoming Satellite, compatible with assistence platforms such as Home Assistant. They are at least supposed to be able to show it working with some factory software [1]. I would have just liked to have seen some edge compute capability. [1] https://pine64.org/documentation/PineVoice/

Would love for Pine64 to thrive. I don't own any of their products, but I am glad they exist.