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'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.
> as they seem to never restock most of their products
There is a product development strategy (I'm not sure if there's a formal name for it) where you're given a lead on a finite-but-large supply of parts you can acquire for absurdly cheap; so you buy the batch; develop and price a product around the part; market your product until you run out of the part; and then, rather than switching over to paying retail for the parts and pricing up your product, you just put your product on indefinite restock hiatus (only ever to be fulfilled if you happen to get another lead on a cheap supply of that same part.)
Usually, though, you get a lead on a cheap supply of a different part; and so the cycle begins again.
> 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.
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.
I have their Pinecil and PinePower Desktop. They're really great products, I use the PinePower daily to charge my stuff at my desk and the Pinecil made soldering a joy, now I no longer dread it and can enjoy tinkering with hobby electronics again.
This is just a satellite device for Home Assistant (self-hosted) which you can set up to do processing however you’d like. There are cloud options for each stage of the pipeline (speech to text, LLM to turn text into tool calls, text to speech), but there are local options for all of that: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_loc...
> PineVoice is in an early-stage development and early adopters will encounter quirks and performance issues. Future firmware updates should resolve issues in time, but like all of Pine64’s products, you’re not buying a consumer-grade product.
Like the Penny Arcade comic about a director who’s making a movie that’s not meant for the critics. “Wait, you can do that?”
Does this device allow raw access to the microphone array? Considering the SoC I might want to stream it elsewhere for processing. How many independent channels does the array provide?
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'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.
> as they seem to never restock most of their products
There is a product development strategy (I'm not sure if there's a formal name for it) where you're given a lead on a finite-but-large supply of parts you can acquire for absurdly cheap; so you buy the batch; develop and price a product around the part; market your product until you run out of the part; and then, rather than switching over to paying retail for the parts and pricing up your product, you just put your product on indefinite restock hiatus (only ever to be fulfilled if you happen to get another lead on a cheap supply of that same part.)
Usually, though, you get a lead on a cheap supply of a different part; and so the cycle begins again.
> 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/
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.
Have you looked into third party firmware for your Echo? I just bought some used Echo Shows that others have figured out how to install LineageOS on.
Would love for Pine64 to thrive.
I don't own any of their products, but I am glad they exist.
I have their Pinecil and PinePower Desktop. They're really great products, I use the PinePower daily to charge my stuff at my desk and the Pinecil made soldering a joy, now I no longer dread it and can enjoy tinkering with hobby electronics again.
It’s funny that it comes with a 30 day warranty.
I love that this is out and one day hope to replace my alexas and whatnot so I can turn on my lights without hearing an ad for amazon prime.
Does this use _local_ processing of voice commands?
This is just a satellite device for Home Assistant (self-hosted) which you can set up to do processing however you’d like. There are cloud options for each stage of the pipeline (speech to text, LLM to turn text into tool calls, text to speech), but there are local options for all of that: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_loc...
My reading of the documentation [1] is that everything is local.
[1] https://pine64.org/documentation/PineVoice/Software/
> PineVoice is in an early-stage development and early adopters will encounter quirks and performance issues. Future firmware updates should resolve issues in time, but like all of Pine64’s products, you’re not buying a consumer-grade product.
Like the Penny Arcade comic about a director who’s making a movie that’s not meant for the critics. “Wait, you can do that?”
This one: <https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24/the-adventures...>
i just wonder how good it sounds. open audiophile grade hardware is something of a gap.
Nah. A true audiophile would be analog only - no room for anything digital, smart or connected. “Wifi EM interferes with the sound”
It’s an off the shelf SOM.
Audiophiles are safe from this device.
Does this device allow raw access to the microphone array? Considering the SoC I might want to stream it elsewhere for processing. How many independent channels does the array provide?
From the sources it is based on BL606P
https://en.bouffalolab.com/product/?type=detail&id=16
voice processing is in hardware unfortunately, but it exposes some things like DOA