Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Audio Notifier for Home Assistant using ESP8266: Play MP3, TTS & RTTL (DIY Project #4)

Hey, what's up guys! Welcome back to my channel. Today, I'm going to share with

you something I've been working on for the past couple of weeks. But first, let

me give you a quick demo. The hardware is very simple: a D1 Mini with an audio

jack. So, let me plug it in and show you what it can do. **music**, "Hello There", "Do not forget to

Like & Subscribe". So as you can see it's controlled by

mqtt messages. You can make it play mp3 files, say text, and play cell phone tones.

The reason I built it is because a month ago my ISP had a major internet outage

and all my smart speakers pretty much stopped working and I lost all audio

notification from my home automation system - which is home assistant. So, I

started looking into building a cloud-free notifier that I can use and control

locally. I did a quick search on the web and I found some mp3 player projects but

they all use this mini mp3 module that you have to preload the files in the SD

card beforehand which is not very practical. Then I discovered a library

called ESP8266Audio which allows a device like that Wemos D1 Mini to

play mp3 files directly from a URL and this is where I started. So after a

couple of hours of coding, I got it to play mp3 files by sending the file URL over

an MQTT message.. and I also added other functionalities like text-to-speech and

playback of the RTTL tones. It has been working great so far when I use it

with an external amplifier. But I wanted to integrate it with a speaker directly.

So first I tried a very simple one transistor amplifier, but it was too

quiet. Then I tried cheap dollar-store speakers but the quality

wasn't very good. So I decided to simply buy a decent mini amplifier from China.

I'm still waiting for it to arrive in the mail and when it arrives I'm

planning to gut out a damaged Google Home Mini I have and use the speaker

with the mini amplifier to create a nice standalone audio notifier. So if you're

interested in that, make sure to follow me on Twitter. I will be posting updates

there! To make it easy for everyone to build, I created a bin file that you can

load directly with Tasmotizer. But before we do that, if you liked this

video, hit the LIKE button and if you want to see more consider Subscribing

and if you're interested in supporting my channel please check out my Patreon

page. The first step is to connect your D1 Mini to your computer, open Tasmotizer

and load the bin file. Check the description below for the link to get

the file.

When it is finished, connect to the Wi-Fi network called "MrDIY Notifier" and the

password is "mrdiy.ca". You should get this pop-up, if not go to 192.168.4.1

and fill in your Wi-Fi network name password,

your MQTT server IP and credential. When done, press SAVE and connect back to

your home Wi-Fi. On the hardware side, simply get a audio jack, cut it in half

and solder the left and right channels to RX and ground-to-ground.

Now, you are ready to plug it in into your stereo. If you hear this sound *sound*, it

means it's connected successfully to your Wi-Fi and MQTT server. Here is a

quick example in home assistant where I created an automation that plays an

alarm sound everyday at 7 a.m. Here is the same thing done with NodeRED.

Here is a full list of commands you can use. And as always links to the specific

products I use in this video are in the description below along with the

instructions and download links. This is it!! Let me know in the comment section if

you are planning on building one or if you have a project idea that you think I

should look into. Peace!