Squeezelite-ESP32 on Esparagus Boards

To get rid of my Sonos boxes, which constantly flooded my network with calls back to their homestation, I went looking for an alternative that I could fully control myself.

Luckily, I found a solid replacement with the Esparagus Boards. For good Home Assistant integration, plus support for Bluetooth, Spotify, and AirPlay, I decided to install the Squeezelite-ESP32 firmware on my newly acquired Louder Esparagus.

Install Firmware

Short guide to installing the Squeezelite-ESP32 firmware:

1. Connect the device to your computer with USB-C
2. Open the web installer in a Chromium browser and select your board
3. Follow the process to complete installation (you can pre-configure Wi-Fi during setup)

On Linux, fix permissions:

sudo setfacl -m u:user:rw /dev/ttyUSB0

Replace user with your username and /dev/ttyUSB0 with the connected device.

Configuration

By default, squeezelite-esp32 depends on finding an LMS server. If none is available, the device keeps rebooting. For AirPlay/Spotify only, discovery should be disabled.

To do this: open Credits in the web UI, enable the NVS Editor, and set the following under autoexec1:

squeezelite -o i2s -s -disable -b 500:2000 -C 30 -d all=sdebug

This prevents the reboot loop and keeps AirPlay/Spotify working.