I'm sure that the install is successful because there are no errors during/after install, the Echo recognizes speech and interacts with Home Assistant, and when I change something in the yaml (e.g., which media player to pipe the audio to) the change takes effect.
Here's something weird: I believe the default pin for "speaker" should be GPIO22, and when I switch it to GPIO21 it should not work. This works on some of my Echos, but not all of them!
Also weird: I think the standard pinout is:
GPIO0: Button (Boot)
GPIO19: LED (RGB)
GPIO21: I2C SDA
GPIO22: I2C SCL
GPIO23: Speaker (PWM output)
GPIO25: Microphone (Analog input)
Though I don't know what these mean, I tried setting "speaker" to GPIO18 - which apparently isn't used- and still the audio comes out of the Echo speaker! But again, only on some of my Echos.
I'd think that maybe some of these Echos are ignoring the GPIO setting for "speaker" and using a default, but these Echos used to work! (that is, they used to not play audio out of the Echo speaker when "speaker" was GPIO21). And so I want to think that maybe the ESPHome upgrade made them stop working, but all my Echos have the same upgrade and yet still some of them work.
Is there a way to config the Echo speaker to have zero volume? If so, I could just set that and then who cares if the audio is piped to it.