reSpeaker flashing

Some devices use a reSpeaker Flex XVF3800 mic array (XMOS) paired with a XIAO ESP32S3. Out of the box it's in I²S mode and does not enumerate as a USB audio device — so the Pi sees zero capture devices. It must be flashed once into USB Audio Class (UAC) mode. Full steps live in docs/respeaker-flash.md.

Symptoms that mean "it needs flashing"

• arecord -l shows no capture devices.
• lsusb is missing the Seeed entry (2886:...).
• Voice does nothing because there is, literally, no microphone yet.

What flashing does

You put the board into DFU mode and flash the UAC firmware. After flashing, the XMOS USB-C port enumerates as a standard USB audio device — on the home Pi it comes up as card 3 / plughw:3,0.

One-time, per board

This is a hardware provisioning step done once per reSpeaker board, not something the software does at runtime. Once flashed, the audio device picker finds it like any other USB device.

Device-specific access notes live in memory/runbooks, not here

Specific Pi IP addresses, passwords, and card numbers are operational details kept in the team's runbooks — this page documents the concept and symptoms. See docs/respeaker-flash.md for the exact flashing commands.