I use a Raspberry Pi to drive two sets of speakers using Snapcast.
To maximize the range of my Bluetooth speaker, I bought a Realtek
RTL8761B-based USB Bluetooth dongle with a large antenna.
To get the Bluetooth dongle to work with the latest kernel drivers and
bluez-alsa, I had to abandon Raspbian Linux and use the latest Debian Linux
instead.
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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've been running network services on embedded arm platforms for for more than
8 years now, and when things go wrong, had to drag around HDMI monitors to hook
up. For the last years I had a pi connected to the serial console to avoid
that.
I have been mounting all my networking and smarthome devices on a
DIN rail, and I had some small 2.2" TFT displays around for a different project.
I thought it would be nice to create a raspberry pi enclosure that included
such a display so there's a real video console on the device that can also be
used as status display.
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When a friend of mine showed the awesome little wooden Jukebox he made for his
kids, I loved the idea, and knew I could make a similar contraption by
recycling an old Raspberry Pi 1 I had on a shelve.
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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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