Imre Laszlo Opens Crowdfunding for the MiciMike — A Drop-In Upgrade for the Google Home Mini

Privacy-focused home automation engineer Imre Laszlo has opened crowdfunding for the MiciMike — a drop-in replacement motherboard for the Google Home Mini smart speaker that swaps out cloud dependence in favor of local connectivity to Home Assistant.

"You probably have one sitting in a drawer right now — a Google Home Mini that stopped being useful the moment you decided to take back control of your smart home," Laszlo explains of his creation. "It works perfectly fine as a piece of hardware: it has a quality speaker, a compact well-designed enclosure, and microphone positions that work. MiciMike transforms this into your own privacy-respecting and open source voice assistant. Just swap the board and your old cloud-dependent device becomes a fully local Home Assistant voice assistant. The board arrives pre-flashed and ready to use — no firmware installation required."

The custom board, designed as a direct drop-in replacement for Google's original and first unveiled earlier this year, is built around Espressif's ESP32-S3 wireless microcontroller combined with an XMOS XU316 audio processor. The latter chip handles streaming audio from the microphones, but only once the "wake word" has been uttered — for which it is, like most smart speakers, always listening until and unless the mute button has been pressed.

"Running on ESPHome with Home Assistant's local voice pipeline, your voice commands can be processed entirely within your home — no cloud, no vendor account, no subscription," Laszlo promises. "If you prefer to use a cloud-based conversation agent […] that option is available too. Privacy is not enforced, but it is genuinely possible — and that is more than most devices offer. The hardware mute functionality physically disconnects the microphones — not a software flag, but an actual hardware switch inherited from the original Google Home Mini design. When it's muted, it's muted."

While Laszlo is crowdfunding production of the boards themselves, he's also releasing them as open hardware under the strongly reciprocal variant of the CERN Open Hardware License 2. "This matters for several reasons," the engineer explains. "It means you are never dependent on a single vendor for support, updates, or spare parts. It means the community can build on, improve, and adapt the design. It means that if something needs fixing, you can fix it — or someone in the community will."

The MiciMike is now funding on Crowd Supply, at $85 with free US shipping; hardware is expected to begin shipping in October this year. The design files, meanwhile, are already available on GitHub.