Mic needs hard reboot in Home Assistant

I am running Home Assistant on a Jetson Orin Nano with a working assist-microphone - openwakeword - faster-whisper - piperTTS voice pipeline. All pipeline components are dustynv docker containers. My microphone is a ReSpeaker xmos XVF3800 usb mic array.

The only problem is that when I boot up HA I have to physically disconnect the usb from the microphone and reconnect it before it works. I would really like to know how to fix this, either by finding out the what is happenning or by rebooting the mic without having to physically remove and replug the usb cable.

Thanks for the detailed setup description. The USB microphone requiring a physical disconnect/reconnect on boot suggests a device initialization or enumeration timing issue—likely in the USB driver, Home Assistant pipeline startup, or the ReSpeaker firmware.

To help diagnose this, please provide:

  1. Home Assistant logs from a boot cycle where the microphone is non-functional (before and after USB reconnect). Check /config/home-assistant.log or the UI logs.

  2. Container logs from the assist-microphone, openwakeword, faster-whisper, and piperTTS containers during the same boot cycle. You can retrieve these with docker logs <container_name>.

  3. USB and kernel logs:

    • Output of lsusb and lsusb -v showing the ReSpeaker device
    • Kernel logs: dmesg | grep -i usb or journalctl -b | grep -i usb to see USB enumeration and any errors during boot
  4. Reproduction details:

    • Does this happen on every boot, or intermittently?
    • Are there any error messages in the Home Assistant UI or container logs indicating the microphone is detected but not responding?
  5. Workaround testing: Has a programmatic USB reset been attempted? For example, using usb_reset command or a Home Assistant automation to cycle the device.

Once we have these logs, we can pinpoint whether the issue is in the HA pipeline startup order, the USB driver, or the device firmware.

Could you check output of “cat /proc/asound/cards” when it works and not. Just like to confirm if USB sound card registered during reboot.