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A comment on My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant. Parent comment

Re:My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voi... by stavros on Monday March 16, 2026 @02:17PM (#47402706)
The new board hasn't come yet, but a friend gave me a great idea, to power the mic from a GPIO, which powers it off completely when the ESP is off.

Hopefully the new boards will be here soon, but another issue is that I don't really have anything that can measure microamp consumption, so any testing takes days of waiting for the battery to run down :(

I do think these clones are the issue, though. They had a LED I couldn't turn off, so they'd literally shine forever. They don't seem engineered for low quiescent current, so fingers crossed with the new ones.

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Re:My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voi... by CurleighBraces on Monday March 16, 2026 @03:15PM (#47403436)
Makes a lot of sense :) thanks for the update.

I'll try to remember to creepy stalk you for updates as the device sounds great!

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Re:My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voi... by stavros on Monday March 16, 2026 @03:39PM (#47403771)
You can sign up to my mailing list to get emails if you want! It's at the end of each post.
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Re:My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voi... by mlrtime on Tuesday March 17, 2026 @07:18AM (#47411149)
Thank you for the blog/updates.

Since you're deep into this space, Do you use wall mount dashboards? There seems to be two camps now: Dashboards everywhere or none at all.

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Re:My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voi... by bigiain on Tuesday March 17, 2026 @06:28PM (#47419225)
Is it worth removing the led from the board? Wont help with any other decisions by the designer that draw excess current, but maybe that's the only or largest one?
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Re:My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voi... by stavros on Tuesday March 17, 2026 @07:16PM (#47419651)
I did remove it :( It's still pretty bad. I ordered some Xiaos that do explicitly say 14 uA sleep current, but they seem to have gotten lost in the mail!
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