Constant dropouts and/or disconnects

[tadly]

First of, thanks for the project. Really appreciate it :)
I built 3 Sendspin_Zero-NO_Display-Analog.

Sadly I have constant dropouts. Best "streak" was 2-3 min. of uninterrupted playback across a few days of trying.
Right now they play for about 20-30 seconds before the start chugging and eventually completely dropping out for like 30 seconds.
It's really rough.

A few noteworthy things:

• sendspin-cli on linux works absolutely spotless (connected via eth)
• sendspin on Home Assistant Voice Preview works much better as well
  • tested for about 10 min
  • furthest from my router at about 7m with a few walls
• I used different power-supplies (including a one-plus charger <- should be high quality?)
• Tested 1m away from router
• In Music Assistant -> Players -> SendspinZero "forced" Opus in the hopes of reducing network traffic (not sure that even works with esphome)
• Same rooms where I tried the SendspinZero I have snapcast clients running on Amazon Fire Tables without issues
• Tried SendspinDroid on the tables
  • No drouputs
  • Completely out-of-sync though (so unusable)

Here the zero was essentially right next to my router again (but connected via low power usb)
esp-web-tools-logs.txt

Not sure if here is even the right place to open the issue but I gotta start somewhere :)

Edit:
What I bought to build the three.
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0CR2RH7PS
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0GCK53SKK

[RealDeco]

could be wifi, be certain no power cords are covering the little antenna, and you can try to remove the output_power in wifi settings and see what that changes

wifi:
output_power: 8.5dB <<
ap:

maybe it's not needed with waveshare's modules 🤷🏼‍♂️

[tadly]

Quick update.

I changed output_power to the full 20dB which works much better.
Also tried 17dB but that was causing dropouts (although much more infrequent than with the 8.5dB).

Before closing the issue I'd like to experiment with setting the psram -> speed to 40MHz and report back my findings as I noticed the 3D-Printed enclosure is getting warmer than expected where the esp is sitting.

[RealDeco]

you should check that cables inside the box isn't around the antenna, that would cause bad connection

[tadly]

Alright.
Tried 40MHz and it didn't work at all (gave up rather quick though)

When you say "around" the antenna, do you mean covering the antenna?
Thought this was one of the better ones I made :D

Because it neatly loops around the antenna I thought it could create a tiny magnetic field or whatever and folded the wires over to the DAC.
As of now it seems to work better (still on 20dB though)

before folding over the wires. haven't made a after pic

[RealDeco]

yeah that looks like it's nicely avoiding covering the antenna, one of mine i used tape to hold thee cables together but that there looks neat enough

[onlynow2]

I also experienced some occasional dropouts and figured out WiFi signal was really weak.
Has anyone tried to wire up a W5500 lite ethernet module to the esp32 yet?
I got it connected, defined in ESPHome, but establishing an ethernet connection was not possible.

[RealDeco]

which version of the device?, some of them uses high performance wifi settings, if they do you can spot this in the yaml:

psram:
  mode: quad
  speed: 80MHz
  ignore_not_found: false

rem out the last line and test (or add and test if you didn't have that line)

[Hukuma1]

Was about to order the same components (in the US though). So is the issue weak wifi or is this just not a capable device overall? I'm looking to retrofit in-ceiling speakers with SendSpin for Music Assistant abilities.

[onlynow2]

I've got multiple Waveshare ESP32-S3 running: amazon link
They have configured the same parameters you mentioned, except the "ignore_not_found".
I might try setting the parameter.
Currently I'm also not using them in any case, they just sit behind the aux-connected speaker.

[onlynow2]

Quick update:
I tried different settings, but could not get the ESP32-S3 Mini to work with W5500 at all (though, might be related to the jumper cables i used).

With an ESP32-S3 ETH working much better, regarding ethernet connection but still not usable for relaiable music playing.
Constant music dropouts on "FLAC 48kHz/16bit stereo" setting in music assistant.
Changing the setting to "FLAC 48kHz/16bit mono" was better, but I still feel sendspin is not yet ready to work with any ethernet connection. From what i found out, SPI bus might be the bottleneck here.
I'll stick to use WIFI until the sendspin project evolves a little more.

[Hukuma1]

I got ESP32-S3-Zero with a W5500 module up and running. But I am getting the same drop outs as you I assume. So you think it has to do with the bandwidth (e.g. better if you drop the quality of music)? Is wifi working for you just fine? I am going to switch to wifi right now to see if I no longer have these issues.

[Hukuma1]

Just tried over wifi and yeah, perfect audio. No cut outs like observed over ethernet.

Is there a way to debug this? Would love to fix it for everyone to enjoy smooth wired audio. Where would I log an issue? Music Assistant? ESPHome? SendSpin? Here...?

[tadly]

Could you guys check the signal strength you're getting over wifi?
I'm still having regular cut outs and am about to buy some access-points to sprinkel around the appartment.

My offenders are at around -70dBm to -74dBm.

My HA Voice (which is furthest from the router) gets -61dBm so coveraged for all other devices is fine.
It's just the esp zero which are struggling.

You can add this to the config. Thanks in advance :)

sensor:
  - platform: wifi_signal
    name: "WiFi Signal dB"
    id: wifi_signal_db
    update_interval: 60s
    entity_category: "diagnostic"

[RealDeco]

sendspinzero-button in bathroom-70 dBm, sendspinzero-display in this room -48 dBm, both plays perfect 👌

[tadly]

Have you had it playing for an extended period of time? like 10-20 minutes?

Also, I just noticed that output_power is not the same across your configuration files.
Some have it missing an the esphome documenation says the following:

output_power (Optional, string): The amount of TX power for the WiFi interface from 8.5dB to 20.5dB. Default for ESP8266 is 20dB, 20.5dB might cause unexpected restarts.

What it defaults to for the s3-zero I don't know. I still have it at 20dB across all devices.

Do you have your router (and potentially additional access points) set to 100% wifi output power?

I did order some mesh repeater for my fritz!box which arrive tomorrow. Hope this improves things for me.
Depending on where I physically stand / move to it absolutely destroys playback :(

[onlynow2]

I got ESP32-S3-Zero with a W5500 module up and running. But I am getting the same drop outs as you I assume. So you think it has to do with the bandwidth (e.g. better if you drop the quality of music)? Is wifi working for you just fine? I am going to switch to wifi right now to see if I no longer have these issues.

Did you solder the W5500 pins directly to the ESP32? I used jumper cables and a breadboard, which might be part of the issue (but I wanted to test before soldering 😅).

Yes WiFi worked for me just fine, except the dropouts.
Wifi signal strength was pretty weak though (around -70dB). That's why I wanted to try ethernet connection.

I'm not an expert in this, but I think with ethernet connection there might be a bandwidth problem in the ESP32's SPI bus.
Also the Louder-ESP32 module is not able to use sendspin with ethernet (sonocotta/esp32-audio-dock/issues/98) and sonocotta/esp32-audio-dock/issues/101)

Got a WiFi repeater now, but I was not able to fully test playing music for a couple of hours yet.

[RealDeco]

from https://esphome.io/components/ethernet/:

If your Ethernet board is not designed with the microcontroller built in, it's common to attempt to use flying leads, dupont wires, etc. to connect the Ethernet controller. This approach is likely to fail, however, as the Ethernet interface uses a high frequency clock signal that will not travel reliably over these types of connections.

[RealDeco]

over a hour since i started playing and not a single drop, even tried syncing with 5 other players in that time and still playing..

if using same hardware and same yaml the main things that could cause issues is of course how it's put together and the build quality of the esp32-s3 zero which im sure can vary as quality control isn't a big thing over there.
what we can try if it's the way it's put together is as i mentioned before, moving the cables around to a different place and avoid loops (loops around the antenna can make things even worse), even twisting the power cords together can make a difference, but mostly it's enough to keep the cables short and out of the way from the antenna.

tweaking all sorts of setting is a bandaid, some might help but the original issue is still there and you end up spending hours tweaking someting that should even need tweaking 🤷🏼‍♂️

[tadly]

Based on my Picture above, I moved all cables over to the DAC yesterday (i really bunched them together so none are in the left side of the casing) and closed the the box.
For me, it changed nothing in regards to reported dBm.

I really don't want to re-solder anything but would love to test a "naked" esp at the exact same spot to see if there's really that much of a difference (don't have one spare).

That said, it's somewhat well known that the wifi antenna/module isn't the best and I am also considering this mod
I just don't have silver coated wire.

Tomorrow I'll see if the additional Access Points make a noticable difference.

[Hukuma1]

-55dB for my wifi test speaker.

I first had everything on dupont connections to verify it powered on, connected, etc. Once I heard it playing some music I soldered all the wiring. I see the warning ESPHome has for such connections, but confused because even soldered I am still having issues. I am wondering if it's clock speed related. The default is 26.67MHz apparently. ESPHome just released some commits for ethernet too. https://esphome.io/changelog/2026.6.0/#wifi-and-ethernet-now-truly-free-their-memory-when-disabled-at-boot In the config listed for the lower CPU usage the person used clock speed of 10 MHz. I'm going to give that a shot. Audio should 100% not be dropping out over ethernet. And while my wifi is working okay, the point is to always have it wired in case of wireless network congestion.

Btw volume_min: 0.4 almost caused me to wake everyone up while testing! Using the no-display-analog config. Any reason that's there? Guessing because my amp gives plenty of boost, it definitely is not needed for my setup.

[Hukuma1]

Switching the SPI from the default 26.67 MHz down to 10 brought a lot more stutters. So I decided to bump it instead. At 40 it was almost perfect. At 53 I do not have any skipping whatsoever thus far. I say solder up your wires (I did it on a perfboard) and try higher clock speed for the SPI. As of right now, this is the working solution it seems!

[tadly]

Switching the SPI from the default 26.67 MHz down to 10 brought a lot more stutters. So I decided to bump it instead. At 40 it was almost perfect. At 53 I do not have any skipping whatsoever thus far. I say solder up your wires (I did it on a perfboard) and try higher clock speed for the SPI. As of right now, this is the working solution it seems!

I'm very new to micro-controller stuff and I have no idea what this even means.
Is this what I should be looking at? https://esphome.io/components/spi/

If so, would you be so kind and share what you have configured now? :)

Edit:
Tried to figure it out with gemini and while I didn't understand everything I assume you are referring to the psram configuration?
That does only allow for 40MHz or 80MHz so the 53 still confuse me.

[Hukuma1]

ethernet:
  type: W5500
  clk_pin: GPIO10
  cs_pin: GPIO8
  miso_pin: GPIO9
  mosi_pin: GPIO11
  clock_speed: 40Mhz

Change the clock_speed to 40Mhz. It defaults to 26.67MHz. 53 ended up giving me garbage after a little bit and wasn't as stable as I thought. I think Sendspin is just very bleeding edge (especially with ethernet) so some cutouts/drops are just the way it is for now. But it was cutting out WAY less frequently when I changed just this figure. But for the real test you need those wires a) soldered and b) short. No long running dupont connections hanging.

[tadly]

Oh. You where still talking about the the W5500. No I understand :)

As a side-note. This has way less extreme interrupts and only short cuts every 30-60 sec.

Before, playback would literally stall for 30 seconds and longer and give me 0.5 sec audio chunks every now and again.
Then it would randomly stabilize for a few mins before the same thing happened again.

The 10dB output-power results in the same measured dBm (maybe +1 or +2).
psram speed of 40MHz is doing wonders right now but likely is also the cause for the short cuts.

Still waiting for my repeaters to arrive (:

wifi:
  output_power: 10dB
  power_save_mode: none
  ssid: !secret wifi_ssid
  password: !secret wifi_password

psram:
  mode: quad
  speed: 40MHz

[Hukuma1]

Ah my apologies, yes, I am trying to get ethernet working so I don't have to worry about wifi signal strength.

Btw I don't want to start a new thread but @RealDeco have you seen that ESPHome has an audio DAC section? It seems to list a few options in the GUI like 32bit for the sound. Curious if that will help since I know your SendSpinZero configs all do the highest FLAC quality.

audio_dac:
  - platform: pcm5122
    i2c_id: i2c_1
    id: audio_dac_pcm5122_1
    bits_per_sample: "32bit"

Any way to migrate your config to this? It requires an i2c component, but that conflicts with what we already have setup. Just curious if you saw this or tested it. Sorry, I'm brand new to ESPHome.

[tadly]

Quick update.

On the day where everything worked really well, in the evening it all fell apart again without me changing anything.
My assumption is that the router picked a bad channel as that's set to auto.
Sadly I don't have a history to verify that.

The next day in the morning I've set the channel to be fixed at 6.
Even with reported -76dBm and neighboring wifi also using channel 6 it worked really well.

In the evening I've added my new mesh-repeaters (still fixed channel) and reduced signal strength to 50% on the router and repeaters.
So far everything is working fine. I still have the micro-drops but these might be due to the psram 40MHz setting which I'll propably change today.

I'm not really sure what to make of this as -76dBm is really bad (generally speakign) and I had really bad behaviour with -68dBm which is obviously better.

[Hukuma1]

Update on my end too:

Seems ethernet still cuts out. It's weird, but definitely feels like a software/firmware issue. The hardware is more than capable of doing it. I think it's some handshake anomalies. I may go back to wifi for the time being...

Are you not observing better dB levels with your repeaters? Make sure you wire those new repeaters for the best outcome. Don't let them just connect via wifi to the main AP.

[tadly]

Are you not observing better dB levels with your repeaters? Make sure you wire those new repeaters for the best outcome. Don't let them just connect via wifi to the main AP.

Sadly can't do that but yes, dB levels are better.
Still weird how it worked well with a fixed channel and -76dBm. Neigbour interference hits hard I guess 🤷

Right now I'm pretty happy with it all though :)

Seems ethernet still cuts out. It's weird, but definitely feels like a software/firmware issue. The hardware is more than capable of doing it. I think it's some handshake anomalies. I may go back to wifi for the time being...

While I'm not part of the hype-train in regards to AI, sometimes usefull stuff comes out of it.
Throw your entire yaml config + hardware configuration into Gemini and/or ChatGPT and tell it the behaviour you're observing.
Even if it's just for brainstorming ideas on how to fix it.
The more details you provide the better.

[Hukuma1]

I went back to stock yaml config from RealDeco.

What ended up fixing (for ethernet anyway) was:

network:
  enable_high_performance: false

Worth a try for you as well! Check your logs to see if you had the same issues as the thread I found that suggested in: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/my-esp32s3-pcm5102a-dac-media-player-doent-work/999827/26

Just had a two hour 16-bit FLAC playing with zero drop out/stutter. 🤞

[tadly]

The official esphome doc in regards to this is very interesting: https://esphome.io/components/network/

Already had e big write-up of trying to analyse the root cause here but in the end I'm just guessing so I deleted it again :D

My TL;DR assumption:
The window/buffer size difference between PSRAM guaranteed and Without PSRAM

Thanks for sharing the find, will try when back home :)

[tadly]

Feedback time :)

No issues since setting enable_high_performance: false even with not so great wifi signal strength.
The one in the kitchen is around -70 to -74 dbm and playback is solid.

Also, this is part of todays beta which sounds interesting as well.

[onlynow2]

I went back to stock yaml config from RealDeco.

What ended up fixing (for ethernet anyway) was:

network:
  enable_high_performance: false

Worth a try for you as well! Check your logs to see if you had the same issues as the thread I found that suggested in: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/my-esp32s3-pcm5102a-dac-media-player-doent-work/999827/26

Just had a two hour 16-bit FLAC playing with zero drop out/stutter. 🤞

I just tried the setting with my ESP32-S3-ETH:
It seems to work 🎉
Thank you very much for this hint!

I only experience a few seconds of stuttering when starting the playback initially or after Pause/Play.
Will do some more listening the next days 😃

Just checked the logs I saved earlier, the issue in the thread you linked, seems to be the same I had:

[17:14:19.779][D][speaker_source_media_player:285]: State changed to PLAYING
[17:14:19.788][D][i2s_audio.speaker:102]: Starting
[17:14:19.789][D][i2s_audio.speaker:106]: Started
[17:14:19.790][D][ring_buffer:034][speaker_task]: Created ring buffer with size 96000
[17:14:20.726][D][i2s_audio.speaker:111]: Stopping
[17:14:20.729][D][i2s_audio.speaker:116]: Stopped
[17:14:20.849][D][i2s_audio.speaker:102]: Starting
[17:14:20.852][D][i2s_audio.speaker:106]: Started
[17:14:20.853][D][ring_buffer:034][speaker_task]: Created ring buffer with size 96000
[17:14:22.310][D][i2s_audio.speaker:111]: Stopping
[17:14:22.315][D][i2s_audio.speaker:116]: Stopped
[17:14:22.407][D][i2s_audio.speaker:102]: Starting
[17:14:22.425][D][i2s_audio.speaker:106]: Started
[17:14:22.425][D][ring_buffer:034][speaker_task]: Created ring buffer with size 96000
[17:14:23.269][D][i2s_audio.speaker:111]: Stopping
[17:14:23.270][D][i2s_audio.speaker:116]: Stopped