I was able to cook up a fun audio setup controlled and automated with Home Assistant!
It features
- Multiple room synchronised audio speakers (fixed/analog, portable Bluetooth devices and via app on phone or tablet)
- Playback of internet radio, Spotify streaming and local audio files.
- Sound notifications for Doorbell, garden gate and other sensors and home alarm events.
In my setup, a docker container running on the Home Assistant machine takes
care of retrieving audio from Spotify, internet radio streams and local
storage.
Physical devices like raspberry pi's or an Android phone/tablet use a snapcast
client to use drive speakers.
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I discovered openHASP while I was searching for projects
integrating touch interfaces with Home Assistant.
It's easy to wire up a cheap ESP microcontroller board and TFT display module,
and by loading this opensource firmware you can turn it into a network
connected touch control panel and control devices and display things.
When I bumped into a nice 2.8" TFT Desktop stand enclosure on thingiverse,
I remembered I had an unused 2.8" ILI9341 display with resistive touch layer
from a previous project.
Connecting the dots... I had all the necessary parts in my workshop, this would
make a nice project to make over a weekend evening.
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I discovered a lovely smart watch development platform; the Lilygo t-watch 2020.
It's an ESP32 based hackable watch, with a small capacitive touch display.
I had already played with the idea of building a small home automation control
and status display that fits into the existing switch cover plate, so clicked
the order button and leveraged the open source watch firmware to quickly hack
together a proof of concept.
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At one point I wanted a basic home security system (burglar alarm) to offer me some peace of mind at night.
My Home Assistant instance has enough sensors to figure out what we are up to,
so it was possible to create an alarm system that works autonomously.
The system automatically arms and disarms while we sleep during
the night and when we leave and return to the house during the day.
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I have used an Ergotron standing desk for 5 years, then it broke, right out of
warranty. Several years ago I started building a sensor device to track how
much time I spend standing up versus sitting down in my chair. The hardware
prototype finished, it got shelved since I found other fun things to do with my
limited hobby-time.
Later I noticed that I was sitting down 99% of the time when working from home.
To revive my healthy habit of working upright part of the time, I decided to
pick up my parked project by re-printing the enclosure I made on my own printer
and leveraging the power of esphome on and home assistant to finish the project
after all.
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When I started working in my home office full-time during COVID-19 lock down,
I wanted a remote control to easily pause my music whenever a Teams call or meeting
started.
I had an IKEA 'hockeypuck' ZigBee control laying around that could easily be
commissioned onto my home assistant setup, which …
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I have Raspberry Pi's in different rooms, and one thing I use them for is to
play music to speakers.
Each of them has two music player services on it (MPD, Spotify), and it's a bit
annoying that I have to stop a player when I want to listen to the other one.
Since I'm running home assistant as an automation hub, I wrote two short
automations that stop the already playing service when the second one kicks in.
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My 2017 Christmas present was a voucher for the local electronics shop.
I spent it on an 'official 7" raspberry pi touch screen display', which is a
nice capacitive touchscreen that you can hook up to a raspberry pi.
I 3d-printed an enclosure from Thingiverse for it, and fitted an RGB LED string
around the edges as an extra.
Initially I created an AppDaemon HAdashboard configuration to control my Home
Assistant instance with it.
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