I’m thinking about repurposing my Mark II unit to take it a slightly different direction. But I think I need to know if I put on an alternative OS, that I can make use of the hardware and drivers. I’m not super savvy.
So for example, for fun I tried putting on a USB drive with RetroPIe, which the screen worked but the audio didn’t. And I wasn’t sure what to actually do to get it to recognize these speakers. And if I wanted to use it as this guy (link below) does with home assistant, that uses a local AI and can even change smart lights and things based on speech commands. This is an attractive alternative that fulfills everything I’d hope the device could do when I invested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvbVePuP7NY
If anyone knows what hardware drivers to load so all the circuit boards and devices in the mark II can work in a different OS, I’d appreciate it. Things that need to work ideally would be volume control, speaker, microphone, fan speed / regulation, top button, mute slider and perhaps if the front camera slider is software and not just a lens cover.
So, you can go a few directions with this. There are a couple of places you can find the drivers and installation instructions for the SJ-201 board in your Mark 2 unit. Then you have a machine you can use for whatever you want. You can also do all the things he’s mentioning in that video with Neon or OVOS - including point it at local AI and Home Assistant. I am doing that and so are several other community members.
Happy to steer you in any direction you want - which do you think sounds best to you?
I guess I’d like to try to get it to work with retropie so I can play kodi and games on it off a USB with audio. For the A.I. part, I’d like to be able to change the voice and improve speed and access an open source LLM ultimately. Doesn’t have to be home assistant right now, as I don’t have relevant connected devices (other than calendar entries and alarms would be cool). but I’ll probably want to do the most extensible option to grow into? Best I can reply with.
side thing, If I can load the drivers or software for a distro to make sue of this SJ-201 board, does that mean attached devices will be accessible/working as a consequence?
I’m not personally very familiar with retropi, but one option may be to start with that and add install the drivers (more on that below).
As far as speed/LLM access through Neon (or any locally-run voice assistant) on the Pi, there isn’t much room for improvement without offloading some work to another system.
I believe this VocalFusion driver will work for Debian kernel 5.10-6.6. The scripts I use to build the Neon OS images are in this repository. It’s not the most user-friendly route, but the pieces are all there to get the audio devices working and integrated with Pulse/ALSA.