What is it

Esparagus Echo is a series of two ESP32-S3-based voice control edge devices. They are designed to work with ESPHome as an edge part of the voice control pipeline. Both devices are enclosed in a neat-looking aluminum case and expose feedback LEDs on the front panel where it is easy to spot them, leaving power and speaker connectors on the backside.

The Esparagus Echo design shares a lot with the earlier Esparagus series of devices, using similar parts and the same pinout whenever possible.

Motivation

I'm a big fan of Alexa. I'm using it around the house, and my family is using it all the time, including 2 years old. However, I do not need to mention privacy concerns, these are quite common. My biggest pain point is the inability to integrate Alexa into the Home Assistant setup that I have at home. I'm a big fan of automation around the house and want to trigger complex flows based on the specific sensors and devices that I have. I think the freedom of the implementation is a bit like the magic of the Home Assistant. Why not have voice control, since everyone around the house is used to it already?

Esparagus Solo

Esparagus Solo has all the basic necessities, a Mic on the front panel, a couple of feedback LEDs, and a speaker at the back. Onboard is a simple and well-known MAX98357 DAC with a reasonable 5W of output audio. It uses a built-in antenna for simplicity. And that's pretty much it.

Esparagus Duo

On top of Solo capabilities, Esparagus Duo uses a dual Mic setup, extra LED, and most importantly 2-channels MAX98357 channels to deliver quality stereo-audio (and thus can be used as a media player device). It uses an external Wifi antenna (much-improved perception) and has SPI Ethernet for the most robust networking to make sure it would stream audio without a hiccup.

Features

⚠️ Loud boards will connect to passive speakers; you can't use headphones or an external amp.

💡 Need to connect an external amp? Check out HiFi Esparagus and Amped Esparagus

💡 Need DSP capabilities? Check out Louder Esparagus and Esapragus Audio Brick

💡 Looking for a more cost-efficient version? Check out Loud-ESP32 / Loud-ESP32-Plus

Boards Pinout

Peripheral - Common

Peripheral - W5500 Ethernet

Software Options

• Home Assistant smart home audio and notifications. Start from the web-installer, as soon as you configure WiFi, the boards will be discovered by the ESPHome add-in automatically. Dedicated configs can be found in the documentation for simple and stable media-player, experimental sendspin protocol, and experimental snapclient component
• Squeezelite-ESP32 Spotify Connect, AirPlay, Bluetooth or Logitech Media Server. Flash directly from your browser using the web-installer. Configure WiFi using Hotspot (default password: squeezelite). Don't forget to exit Recovery mode when done.
• Snapclient multi-room audio streaming with snapserver. Flash directly from your browser using the web-installer, as soon as you configure the WiFi board will discover the snapserver automatically
• Snapclient (edge) - developer version. Developer's version of the snapclient, less stable and more feature-rich for those who cannot wait for new features to be released. Installed via web-installer, similar to standard snapclient
• Apple AirPlay 2 with multi-room sync. Use Platformio IDE to build and flash the AirPlay2 firmware. Pre-configured configurations and web-installer is a work in progress, but you can get it working by providing board configurations and building firmware yourself.
• Your own software. Use Arduino IDE or Platformio IDE and the provided software samples

Using with Home Assistant

Both HiFi Esparagus versions were created specifically to be used with Home Assistant via ESPHome integration. For both boards, rich configs were pre-created with hardware configuration for common use cases. These include

• media_player component for simple and robust media playback and TTS announcements (with ducking effect)
• Sendspin media player – new experimental protocol for multi-room sync with media controls and more
• An experimental snapclient component that allows near-perfect multi-room sync and seamless integration with Music Assistant
• Another snapclient fork with an implemented 15-band software equalizer and a rich set of EQ presets
• Voice assist config (see note below)

Configurations are being actively maintained and upgraded, new experimental components added for you to test and enjoy

Home Assistant - voice assistant

Originally I had an issue configuring the voice-assistant setup on the echo, despite having good examples shared here and here. The reason for the examples to fail was a single I2S bus handling both audio input and output. In theory, this is a perfectly good configuration, since both DACs and both MICs work in slave mode as they should, and I even made a simple Arduino code that captures frames from MIC and sends them over to the Speakers in stereo mode, working beautifully.

ESPHome however was not collaborating, so I decided to go with a hardware fix and use extra pins to run independent I2S buses for both MICs and DACs. Note that currently wakeword does not benefit from the second MIC, but I hope support will be added in the future since Espressiff folks seem to work on that (although they may use external noise-reduction IC, I'm not sure).

All in all, wakeword started to work in revision B, and although it is not as fast as say, Alexa, it is truly amazing to have it working on such a small device.

Please look at this config to make it work. Note that it will also require to configure Home Assistant properly, you may use this official guide, Seeeds docs or community created Youtube tutorial

As I still have a few boards of revision A that I was planning to use with the Walkie-Talkie project, I make them available for purchase, noting once again that it is not working with the wake-word example because of the software quirks, although it works well outside ESPHome (although as a Home Assistant speaker with RGB LEDs it also works without a hassle)

Hardware

Please visit the hardware section for board schematics and PCB designs. Note that PCBs are shared as multi-layer PDFs as well as Gerber archives.

Boxed

Esparagus Solo (Prototype)	Esparagus Solo	Esparagus Duo

PCB

Esparagus Solo (Prototype)	Esparagus Solo	Esparagus Duo

Restocking & Availability

New restock batches are regularly ordered from the factory, and I plan to keep all versions available at least until the next board revision is released.

USA shipping Update

Due to the new tariffs introduced by the Trump administration, standard shipments are temporarily on hold. However, shipping to the US has now resumed via UPS, though rates are currently quite high. I’ll fully resume regular shipping as soon as the restrictions are lifted

Sponsorship & Community Support

If you’re working on an open-source project, an educational initiative, or any pro-bono/volunteer effort, feel free to reach out for sponsorship details. I’ll do my best to provide discounts or even free boards.

Custom Design & Consultation

If you’re interested in a custom design based on or inspired by my boards, I also offer contract design work and consultation when needed.

Most orders are shipped the next business day morning. All shipments are tracked. Delivery time in the EU is 3-7 days, outside 2-3 weeks, depending on the distance. After 30 days, the package is considered lost - reach out for a refund or replacement.