A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

  • 4 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • Nice, thanks for the link! I wasn’t aware of that. Sadly as with all shiny new things it doesn’t fit all my requirements… I’d really like to speak to my house in my native language. But I figure English will do. I’m gonna try that.

    Not sure if an ESP32-S3 is fast enough for more advanced DSP plus the rest of an voice assistant. At least I found some ESP32 libraries with noise reduction, echo cancellation… There is the ESP-ADF and a project called ESP32-SpeexDSP. But I didn’t try that yet. The Rockckip / Luckfox development board looks nice as well. A Cortex-A7 and a few hundred megabytes of memory might come in handy. And whatever the NPU does. But I don’t have a clue what kind of software and libraries we got for embedded Linux or custom processing units.

    Anyway. I think the production-grade stuff mostly uses multiple microphones and a combination of beamforming and echo cancellation. I got 4 inmp441 microphones here. But I lack the software/libraries to tinker with that kind of signal processing.


  • Uh, noise cancellation is hard. First of all, the audio pipeline currently isn’t able to resample the microphones, so mic and output need to be connected to separate i2s buses, or it won’t work simultaneously in the first place.

    And then I had some luck with the microwakeword component. It often triggers correctly even with noise in the background. And I have an automation that mutes all media players and the TV when the wake word is triggered. That’s my “noise cancelling”.

    I think more elaborate noise cancelling is going to require some dedicated hardware (or maybe some proprietary ESP-ADF functions) and a microphone array. But that’s probably as expensive as an Voice PE?!

    I’m not in a good place with the voice assistant anyway. Don’t own a graphics card. So it’s slow. And Whisper never gets all the words right for me. So it’s down to the speech-to-phrase addon. And that seems to be broken as of now. At least I get more connection errors than commands through. I think I’m going to do the Sendspin media player first. And then maybe add a microphone and voice assistant later.


  • I’m currently doing it the other way around. Assemble multiple satellites and spread them through the house. With upcoming Sendspin and Music Assistant this might do whole house audio soon. But I don’t own a Voice PE. I just bought some microcontrollers plus MAX98357A codec/amplifiers and connect them to random old speakers I have in my e-waste / upcycling bin. The one thing with an 3.5" audio jack might just go into the preexisting soundbar or stereo in the livingroom.


  • No worries. Your post was well-written. And I’m glad people could offer some advice. Not even the proficient Lemmy users get all of this right all the time. I just figured I’d drop you a comment in case the mods take action, to spare you the effort to also learn about the modlog and how to look up their note… But seems it wasn’t necessary 😄




  • I think whether you do closed source software is a personal choice. Based on considerations of your application. Like money, of if you want to rely on a company and how well they do their job, if it’s still gonna be around in 7 years. If you can customize it enough to suit your needs. Or you base the decision on ideology.

    I’ve been using Yunohost on the NAS. And it’s simple, works well and is pretty reliable, I didn’t get any major issues for many years now. (And in general, community maintained open-source software has served me well. So that’s what I do.)

    Downsides as a proficient Linux user are: You can’t just mess with the config while the automatic scripts also mess with the config. You need to learn how they’re set up and work around that. Hope software has a config.d or overrides directory and put your customizations there. Or something will get messed up eventually. And you can’t just change arbitrary things. The mailserver or SSO or reverse proxy and a few other components are tightly integrated and you’re never gonna be able to switch from postfix to stalwart or something like that. Or retrofit a more modern authentication solution. It is a limiting factor.
    And YunoHost doesn’t do containers, so I doubt it’s what you’re looking for anyway.

    I’m a bit split on the entire promise of turnkey selfhosting solutions. Some of them work really well. And they’re badly needed to enable regular people to emancipate themselves from big tech. Whether you as an expert want to use them is an entirely different question. I think that just depends on application. If you have a good setup, that might be better suited to your needs. And if done right might be very low maintenance as well. So switching to a turnkey solution would be extra work and it might not pay off. Or it does pay off, I think that really depends on the specifics.


  • Isn’t that a Nintendo Switch game? You’d need to install and run an emulator for that, like you did with Yuzu on Windows. I don’t think Yuzu is around anymore, but there are some sucessors, Eden and Citron? I’d install one of those. At least Eden has SteamOS mentioned on it’s homepage. You need to install it, though. The SteamOS or Linux version from their homepage, not copy the entire emulator over from Windows. After that you can transfer the game files and load them into the emulator. Any variant to copy files between computers should work. A windows network share, USB stick, microSD card, a cloud drive or filedrop/sync tool…




  • Not sure if I get your point. Abstraction is a concept used by IT people to deal with complexity. You’ll use Docker containers in order not to have 200 very specific problems and learn about the intricate details of all of them. Or use a turnkey solution because a working day has a finite amount of hours and you can just not care and have somebody else set the XY value of Postgres to 128 because that’s somehow needed for software M on python x.xx… Of course you’re then not going to learn about these things. It is not “bad”, though, in itself to abstract these issues away from you. Same for the other things I mentioned, networking, virtualization. Abstraction there allows to swap out complex things, do things once and in a clean way because it’s easy to miss things without abstraction and you always need to pay attention to a bazillion of specifics. Also helps with backups, deal with issues because things should break within confined layers, punch above one’s weight, security, do something once and roll it out several times…

    I think what you want to avoid is poorly designed or written software. Or poorly done setups. Or not learn about important things. Abstraction is generally something you want, especially with complex things.


  • Maybe try something like YunoHost. That’s a web server Linux distribution. And it’s supposed to take care of the set up and come with somewhat safe/secure defaults. You’d need some kind of server, though. Or run it in a VM to isolate it from your home services. They have PeerTube, Lemmy, PieFed installable with a few clicks. (There are other projects as well, Yunohost isn’t the only option to help with the set up.)

    But yes, some kind of isolation is probably nice with web services. Also from the home network, and from storage with personal data on it.


  • Yes, OpenWRT lasts way longer. Main thing that ends support is hardware requirements. My old devices with only a few megabytes of memory got dropped eventually. Not because of the chipset, a modern OpenWRT would just not fit any longer. I rarely see other reasons for them to discontinue updates.


  • Not sure if it’s really gritty. Seems it is to a degree. But more like table salt. I stirred it for a bit and it was pretty scratchy for a while but then dissolved entirely after about 2min. I think it’s more water pressure and chemicals doing that job. It sure seems abrasive to coated surfaces, though. I used to put my non-stick pan into the dishwasher. And it wrecked the surface over the course of several months or a year or so. Now I’m not doing that any more and the pan after that lasted me longer. Just my anecdotal evidence, not science… But I’m positive that’s why we’re not supposed to put these things in there. I guess putting a non-stick pan in 5 or 10 times wouldn’t make a noticeable difference, though. But there are other materials, where once does damage. I once (acidentally) put some kind of scoop in, I believe made of aluminum, and that had wrecked it immediately. Had disgusting colors after that.





  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.detohomeassistant@lemmy.worldSmart Lock
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    1 month ago

    If you’re set on these devices, maybe have a look at the open-source projects meant to strip Tuya devices from their Cloud dependencies. There’s some aftermarket firmware available for some devices. And we have projects like TuyAPI, Local Tuya, tuya-mqtt… It involves some tinkering, but some of these devices work with new firmware or a fake version of the API. And there might be some information on specific devices in the HomeAssistant forum. With a bit of luck, someone already tried it. I generally don’t buy devices unless there’s some info in the forum.



  • Hmm. I think the main damage is done by other factors. I mean even before AI, everything turned into subscriptions and services. We use Office365 these days and the documents are in the cloud. There isn’t much need for Free Software Office Suites or mail clients anymore. Operating systems have less impact because honestly only old people use computers. Everyone else does their stuff on a phone. And then we finally crossed the barrier into a post-privacy world and people don’t care. And on top of that large companies take the nice database projects, libraries etc and monetize products with that. Without caring too much if that’s sustainable. And AI is one negative factor amongst many.