Home Assistant Voice Assistant from Playstation Eye Camera

Introduction

The Playstation Eye Camera, has a 4-channel microphone array, which is useful for microphone pickup in room situations. It's a very well option for budget voice assistant inputs, as it has very accurate wakeword detection using Rhasspy.

I'm currently running a setup where I'm running Home Assistant Supervised in a deban 12 Virtual Machine on my Thinkcentre Proxmox server. The Home Assistant is then running a docker (add-on), with Rhasspy.

This works through hardware USB passthrough from Proxmox, into the Debian 12 (Home Assistant Supervised) virtual machine.

Parts needed

• Playstation Eye Camera
  • We're going to need to use the PCB from this, and also the microphone filter grill.
• The 3D print

Guide (Simplified)

This project requires a lot of tinkering with the Playstation Eye Camera, to get it working with Home Assistant, and thereafter Rhasspy.

But generally, it can be put into a few steps:

1. Disassemble Playstation Eye Camera
   1. Remove all plastic parts by unscrewing mounting screws.
   2. Remove the lens
   3. Remove the microphone grill (Will be used later).
       
2. Reassemble into the 3D printed case, no screws required.
   1. Remember to assemble the repurposed microphone grill, into the slots on the top.
       
3. Connect USB to Home Assistant host
   1. Enable hardware USB passthrough for the port, if running inside a virtual machine or docker. Just make sure that the Home Assistant docker or VM owns the port.
       
4. Set up using Rhasspy with PulseAudio on PipeWire passthrough, in some cases, this will work just fine without doing anything, as this is the default (PyAudio) for some installations.

I can't guarantee that it will work instantly, but through a bit of tinkering, and a lot of AI help, you can definitely make this work as i did!