How do I get the Google AIY Voice HAT installed so that MMM can use it?

fribse

Hi All

I’m just starting out with Magic Mirror. I’ve gotten hold of a monitor that I’ve stripped, and I also have a RPi 3+ that I’ve installed with Raspbian Stretch and Magic Mirror, and it has started up in the basic form.
I’ve found the MMM-AssistantMk2 for integration of Google Assistant.
I have a Google AIY voice hat that I would like to use for input and output, but how do I set that up?
But how do I install that on the raspbian?

sdetweil

@fribse why do you want two google interfaces at the same time?

fribse

@sdetweil I don’t want two interfaces, I just want to use the Google Voice HAT, and I can’t seem to find an explanation of how to install and use the HAT with the MMM-AssistantMK2

sdetweil

@fribse thats because MMM-AssistantMk2 doesn’t/won’t use the HAT.

Sean

@fribse
The hardware (HAT) itself could be used for MMM-AssistantMk2, if you have a proper ALSA setup.

fribse

@sdetweil Ok, I see, I just thought of the Voice HAT as a piece of hardware, that should work with everythng

sdetweil

@fribse @Sean will know, he is the MMM-AssistantMk2 author

Sean

@fribse
Under this condition, you can use it as Mic/Speaker for MMM-AssistantMk2

you should be able to record your voice through HAT mic with arecord -d [PROPER_DEVICE] in terminal. Find or set [PROPER_DEVICE].
HAT should be default sound output device, so you should be able to play some mp3/wav file with mpg321 in terminal.
2-1) If HAT is not the default device, you should find or set proper device name/id for HAT speaker out. It should be different with Mic.

fribse

@Sean Hi Sean, sorry I didn’t see your post, ok, so I’ll install the ALSA, I guess I can figure that part out, thankyou for chiming in!

Sean

@fribse
ALSA is default audio framework of Raspbian OS.(of some version of Debina/Ubuntu linux and others also…). You just need to find/set proper setup.

You can check the information of your audio devices with these commands;

arecord -l : for Mic devices;
aplay -l : for Speaker devices;

Those commands will show something similar this;

$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 0: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA]
  Subdevices: 8/8
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
  Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
  Subdevice #2: subdevice #2
  Subdevice #3: subdevice #3
  Subdevice #4: subdevice #4
  Subdevice #5: subdevice #5
  Subdevice #6: subdevice #6
  Subdevice #7: subdevice #7
card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 1: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 IEC958/HDMI]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

This result is just sample. It might be different with your environments.
The combination of card number and device number(and pcm channel also) are the identifier of your device. Unless you set additional setup in your own ALSA configuration, It will have something like "hw:0" or "plughw:1,1" or "default" or just null (by your peripheral environments)

When you use voiceHAT, there might be possibility which has same card/device id for both of Mic and Speaker. It could be an issue for MMM-AssistantMk2 or MMM-Hotword. In that case, you need to configure ALSA setup to give different ids to devices. Sorry, I’m not the kind of Experts so I cannot help you about this topic with details.