Is it just me. I have two Google Home Minis. I was to use them for alerts and set volume. That isn't working very reliably. I have the correct IP address in device on Hubitat. What am I missing?
Are you using the built-in app Chromecast Integration (beta)?
My minis and Homes work fine after running Discover and it creates the devices.
There are no IP's to set.
Not just you.
I have several minis, regular speaker, and a display.
If I do an announcement to a group, maybe one speaker will play.
If I select each speaker individually, they all play at different times and the display will only play part of the message.
You do have to play with a delay or the Prefs TTS delay function sometimes.
If you re-discover speakers sometimes the app will create a second duplicate device. The previous device that was active is now dead and you have to change to the newly created device in your automations.
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Yes, I am using the Chromecast Beta app. Rediscovering did not make a difference. If I go to device and try to change volume it is not reflected in Current States on the right
Did you populate the IP manually? Mine is blank; I have never had to set it.
I assume Chromecast Audio driver, Command Initialize then Set Volume.
removing the IP address got it to set volume and talk. We'll see if that is a lasting fix. Thanks.
I gave up on the mini's. I had one and it would eventually become unresponsive... even though I tried numerous methods to "keep it awake".
I have a total of 3 Minis, 2 Homes and 4 Displays attached to Hubitat.
Mine have worked quite well for several years but you have to set them up to work within the quirks of the Google ecosystem. It took me awhile to get everything to reliably work but now I rarely even need to look at them.
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I have this set to run every 30 minutes:
initialize() on Hallway speaker
My speaker stays connected and does my announcements. I have rarely had it drop out since setting up this rule.
In addition, in the ChromeCast Integration (beta), I have polling enabled at 60 second intervals.
I do have the microphone disabled and only use the GH Mini as a speaker.
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It's interesting, I tried the Init every 30 minutes to keeps everything online, but it always set my Homes and minis to 0 volume.
Every time there was an announcement or we wanted to play music there was confusion as no sound was produced; always had to turn up the volume.
Note that may help: in current versions of Rule Machine (at least with respect to a Google mini speaker), you MUST use the Set Volume command because the volume option in a Speak command simply does NOT work by itself. I had to add the Set Volume command to my rules to fix the fact that the Speak command appears to be broken.
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Prometheus_Xex, try this to keep your Google Nest Minis awake:
NOTE: the speak command is uttering a space; the single quote marks are NOT touching, but are separated by a space character.
Also, in the ChromeCast Integration (beta), enable polling (I use the default of 300s -- 5 minutes -- but StephenH in this thread uses 60s).
See this thread re "bloop" suppression in Minis (that's what the illustrated rule above does, as well as keep the speakers awake):
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Okay. I had incomplete information in my reply. I have a legacy Rule Machine rule that I called "Mini Volume Set." In it is a trigger event which is,
"Hallway speaker reports volume (80) != 80.0"
The action is:
"Set volume on Hallway speaker to 80"
Probably that is why mine does not change to zero on my initialize rule.
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I have never had My Google devices go to zero volume when I send initialize/refresh commands.
What I have found is that I am unable to set the volume of a device unless the media source is attributed to Hubitat. To do this I send a " " (space) to the device to grab it's attention and then I can send a set volume command.
My initialize rule sends an initialize & refresh at the top of every hour (rule attached). I have the polling set in the HE Google Beta App disabled as I didn't find it to work without the Initialize rule and the rule doesn't need the polling. I had my devices setup in 2021 before polling was added to the HE app.
I do a few other things using custom virtual driver's to monitor a rooms occupancy so that I'm not broadcasting to empty rooms. The driver also queues up the announcements so we don't miss any but the driver doesn't effect keeping the devices alive (and it has it's own set of quirks that I have to work around).
I do get the "bloop" sound but I'm not bothered by it so I've never tried to get rid of it. I actually find that it gets your attention before an announcement.
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Might have been a Hubitat update, but at least one of my google home minis is now making announcements without me doing any hocus pocus.
