Got a Raspberry Pi AIY Voice Bonnet Gathering Dust? This Software Update Gets It Working Again

Pseudonymous developer HorseyofCoursey, hereafter simply "Horsey," has brought a long-abandoned partnership between Raspberry Pi and Google back from the dead — by updating the software required for the AIY Voice Bonnet to support the latest Raspberry Pi OS "Trixie" release.

"Once upon a time there was a kit that was a collaboration between Google and Raspberry Pi that came with a convenient board [to make] a 'do-it-yourself intelligent speaker,'" Horsey explains by way of introduction to the project. "They have been paper weights for years as updates to OS left this board behind. The most recent progress was from [developer] viraniac to make it work in [Raspberry Pi OS] Bullseye, but it didn't have full functionality with the microphone. So I forked viraniac's progress and continued to work on it to make it work in Trixie and I'm happy to say after lots of head scratching it works!"

The AIY Projects program was announced back in January 2017 as a partnership between single-board computer specialist Raspberry Pi and Google — officially launching in May that year with the AIY Voice Kit, a bundle with a Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) add-on for adding voice interaction to Raspberry Pi projects. Unusually, initial units were given away for free as a cover-mount on what was known at the time as The MagPi Magazine — complete with AIY Voice HAT, speaker, arcade button, and a cardboard housing for building a push-button interactive voice system.

Unfortunately, the collaboration didn't last long. While a handful of other AIY Projects were announced, all have since been abandoned — and as Raspberry Pi updates its official operating system to follow releases of the Debian Linux distribution on which it's based, all have ceased to operate. All, that is, except the second-generation more compact AIY Voice Bonnet, released with the updated AIY Voice Kit V2, thanks to Horsey's work to do what Raspberry Pi and Google couldn't and update the software for compatibility with the latest Raspberry Pi OS, based on Debian "Trixie."

"What it took to make it work in Trixie," Horsey explains, "[was]: two API renames in the sound driver and rt5645 codec; one probe signature fix in aiy-io-i2c; three platform driver remove() return type fixes across GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output], PWM [Pulse-Width Modulation], and ADC [Analog to Digital Converter]; one missing header in GPIO driver; full pwm_chip API rewrite for the new 6.12 ownership model; one device tree compatible string fix for BCM2837; Makefiles converted to out-of-tree obj-m style."

The updated source code is available on GitHub under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, with more information available in Horsey's Reddit thread.