Will This Make My Smart Speakers Smell Funny?

By and large, most open source and DIY smart home speakers tend to put a heavy focus on specialized voice assistant capabilities. As such, they frequently come equipped with a reasonably powerful processor or neural processing unit to quickly chew through the matrix operations used by neural networks. But while voice assistants may capture a lot of attention, most people spend far more time using their smart speakers to simply listen to music.

For the audiophiles among us, that makes it tougher to come by suitable DIY smart speaker kits. Fortunately, there will soon be one more option to play with called the Esparagus Audio Brick. This device, soon to launch on Crowd Supply, is equipped with a Hi-Fi grade DAC with a built-in amplifier for excellent sound quality, and it is powered by an ESP32 microcontroller for total hackability and easy integration with Home Assistant and Music Assistant.

Each Esparagus Audio Brick can power two audio channels. These can drive whatever tickles your fancy, from the latest in modern technology to vintage speakers with a sound you just can’t find anywhere today. The boards are meant to be placed all throughout the home, in conjunction with an audio player such as Snapcast that synchronizes all of the speakers.

The hardware and software are all open source, so the Esparagus Audio Brick can be tailored to your specific tastes. The cost of the device has not been released yet, so there is no telling how much a house full of them might set you back. But if you want to be one of the first to find out when this project officially launches, be sure to sign up for updates.