My own Combadge

[nielsnl68]

Watching Star Trek and Babylon5 etc. I have always wished to have my own Combadge. But i never found the hardware that would fit the size of a device like that.

My first attempts ware made about 15 years or so based on Bluetooth sadly the number of devices connected devices was to little and i found a lot of issue.

Until Home Assistant started there year of the voice together a couple of years ago, finding the smallest controller board in the form of the M5Stack Atom Echo, and there work on a voice assistant to work on an ESP32, I finally was able to begin working on my Star Trek alike ComBadge project.

This device should work independent of any WIFI or telephone network and should be able to be used in all kind of places using ESPNOW.
And It should be used as a voice assistant service and intercom/walki-talki between devices.

After a lot of iteration's of the badge and hardware configuration's I now have a working prototype.
It currently exist of the M5Stack Atom Echo as controller board, a 300 mAh rechargeable battery, a charger board and a new and bigger speaker for better audio.

At first i tried to use ESPHome as base for the firmware but i never got it working stable, a couple of weeks ago i decided to go native using my own developed layer above ESPNOW named NowTalk that would handle the navigation between devices. And using Audio-Tools to handle the audio part of the device.