Hi Community! Two weeks ago, we announced that in a future update we would be introducing firmware verification the ensure that only official Commodore firmware could be installed on your machine. We made this decision with the very best of intentions, to protect users from unintentionally bricking their devices. But this era of Commodore was born out of a community that values freedom of choice the most, and this plan, whilst then still in the process of being formed, ran counter to that value.

One thing some people hate about voice control is that you need to have a process always running, listening for the wake word. If your system isn’t totally locally-hosted, that can raise some privacy eyebrows. Perhaps that’s part of what inspired [SpannerSpencer] to create this 24th century solution: a Comm Badge straight out of _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ he uses to control his smart home. This hack is as slick as it is simple. The shiny comm badge is actually metal, purchased from an online vendor that _surely_ pays all appropriate license fees to Paramount. It was designed for magnetic mounting, and you know what else has a magnet to stick it to things? The M5StickC PLUS2, a handy ESP32 dev kit. Since the M5Stick is worn under the shirt, its magnet attached to the comm badge, some features (like the touchscreen) are unused, but that’s okay. You use what you have, and we can’t argue with how easy the hardware side of this hack comes together. [Spanner] reports that taps to the comm badge are easily detected by the onboard accelerometer, and that the M5Stick’s microphone has no trouble picking up his voice. If the voice recordings are slightly muffled by his shirt, the Groq transcription API being used doesn’t seem to notice. From Groq, those transcriptions are sent to [Spanner]’s Home Assistant as natural language commands. Code for the com-badge portion is available via GitHub; presumably if you’re the kind of person who wants this, you either have HA set up or can figure out how. It seems worth pointing out that the computer in _Star Trek: TNG_ did have a wake word: “computer”. On the other hand it seemed the badges were used to interface with it just as much as the wake word on screen, so this use case is still show accurate. You can watch it in the demo video below, but alas, at no point does his Home Assistant talk back. We can only hope he’s trained a text-to-speech model to sound like Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. At least it gives the proper “beep” when receiving a command. This would pair very nicely with the LCARS dashboard we featured in January.

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