this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
241 points (98.0% liked)
homeassistant
20017 readers
75 users here now
Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.
Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts.
Home Assistant can be self-installed on ProxMox, Raspberry Pi, or even purchased pre-installed: Home Assistant: Installation
Discussion of Home-Assistant adjacent topics is absolutely fine, within reason.
If you're not sure, DM @GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If it keeps playback functionality only on LAN then it could be a good replacement for the Google Home units I have stashed around that constantly need to ping home even for basic local playback.
If you're talking about Google Home Mini or Google Nest Mini, there is a project on GitHub which replaces the PCB with an open alternative. The boards for the Home Mini are in production right now and Nest Mini is going to be the next.
Ooh, outstanding - I searched recently for whether it was possible to flash open firmware and that seemed to be a bust, but I never thought about a board replacement!
Thanks for the link, I'll be looking into this with great interest.
Edit: ah damn, just saw the price plus shipping to me, and it's a fair bit more than buying complete package other options. It's definitely an awesome initiative and this guy has done an admirable job, just might not be the best fit for me right now. I don't want to contribute to hardware waste, so will keep running what I've got instead of buying brand new speakers, but will keep an eye on this project for sure.
That's true, it's not cheap. But I have a bunch of them in the house which work great as speakers, but I have trouble integrating them properly in Home Assistant. And there are hardly any alternatives in the same form factor.
I had some trouble with them working with HA too, but a while back started running Lyrion Media Server as the backbone to all my local music streaming. Since then, they've all been pretty bulletproof (using the Lyrion/Squeezelite HA integration for all speakers, and no longer piecing together the integrations for the individual speaker types). YMMV, but FYI.
Does yours even work? I have a Polk Google nest capable sound bar and like 4 of the small nest mini speakers and the groups have always inconsistently worked and overall it works like utter shit.
Yeah I've got two sitting around and they work pretty well, but I'm annoyed that they need WAN access to stay working for playing my local media. Would prefer a WAN blackout at the router level to make sure that the microphone off toggle doesn't get "accidentally circumvented" by Google.
My thoughts exactly. Is it a hardware switch, or a hardware switch that just sends a signal to a software switch... 🤔