Your Google Home Mini, Rebuilt for Privacy
Your Google Home Mini, Rebuilt for Privacy Every time you ask your Google Home Mini to turn off the lights, that audio makes a round trip to Google's servers — through infrastructure you don't control — before anything actually happens in your home. A new open hardware project called MiciMike is here to cut that wire entirely. The Short Version MiciMike is a drop-in replacement PCB for the first-gen Google Home Mini. Swap out the original mainboard, slot in MiciMike — same enclosure, same speaker, same touch sensors. You're only replacing the brain. The new brain runs on an ESP32-S3 and an XMOS XU316 voice processor, paired with Home Assistant over your local network. Here's what that means in practice: Wake-word detection and audio preprocessing: 100% on-device Speech recognition and TTS: handled locally by Home Assistant Audio never leaves your home. At any step. Works indefinitely — no Google account, no cloud dependency, no plug-pull risk And it stil...