I’m looking for speakers/receivers that I can get on the hub and turn on and off through triggers (or manually). The idea would be for all of them to reflect what’s playing out of my av receiver that sits in the living room (if music is playing, music, if a movie, reflect that, etc[I would also eventually look to have a solution for having monitors show what’s on the TV, but I don’t think that’ll be wireless and one step at a time]).
I’m pretty early stages - I don’t know how to have my receiver pair/connect with multiple wireless speakers. Also, I don’t know of any speakers that have device controllers written or have the potential to be written to turn the power on and off. I imagine in many cases a full power off would be problematic in case it loses the pairing.
Does anyone have any ideas about this? I can’t be the first one down this road.
Here's an example of a wifi speaker that pushed me to make this post here as oppose to some av forum: wifi marshall speakers
I have a Sony 7.1 a/v receiver STR-D1080 (something like that) working with (eARCed to) a Sony TV 950g (on HE) currently powering a 5.1 system in my living room.
I listen to music a lot and walk into my kitchen dining room and bedroom (+bathroom) . I would love a system that can use my (many) motion sensors to detect what room I’m in and turn on and off the speakers as I move around.
(I’m already working on some HE rule logic to determine the population of people in my apt so Ideally I can change the on/off behavior in the case of 1 and >1)
Edit:
I basically want the exact same set up by throwing up some small monitors in each strategic zone and have them turn on and off to mirror the living room tv in the case it’s on. This seems a lot more challenging and perhaps not worth it due to dependency on video cable protocols (hdmi, 4K) and their short lived path to obsolescence.
More info:
The way I usually get the music on is through Spotify connect to my TV which is eARCed to the receiver.
I'm fairly sure the AVR has RS232 support and so does the TV. Not sure if they have any IP control capabilities. Would need research. Without IP control Hubitat can't do anything with them.
Rather than turning speakers on/off an approach would be to redirect the input to another zone to move from listening zone to zone as you move around. I'm not sure how well motion sensors would really work in this scenario but would be dependent on their placement and sensor types (speed of response) and the controller execution speed to migrate the zones. Again unless the AVR has IP control Hubitat can't do this.
Short stick... If you don't have IP control then Hubitat is not in the equation.
this is possible but would require wiring and I would recommend using a HDBaseT setup so you could run Cat6/7 wiring for video distribution. Then you could have surface mounted or in wall controllers/displays for the video stream and with a Video matrix you could send the video to individual displays or all of them. Again not something Hubitat is going to integrate with.
All of what you're wanting is possible just not with what your using. Your wants are in the realm of RTI, Crestron, Control4, Elan.....
However this is a Hubitat forum so I won't go into the details/howto of those systems. I would suggest looking to see if your equipment has IP control. If it does then you have a possibility of achieving some of what you want. Then you will need to check if there's a Hubitat app/driver for your equipment and if not see if someone would be willing/interested in writing one or you can write one yourself.
Does HE support the Sonos Connect? I don't think it does. If it does this could be viable but there's still the problem of selecting the AVR inputs feeding the Sonos Connect which returns back to the AVR needing to be controlled. Remove the AVR from the equation and just do Sonos players individually and do group/un-group operations to change rooms. Does the HE driver support groups? I dunno....
Which IR controller? A Harmony Hub is the best supported so far and that's limited to Harmony Activities only not very configurable. (Harmony constraint not the app).
I'm not trying to be a downer but being realistic on capabilities versus expectations of the OP. If a device has IP control there's lots of possibilities with Hubitat IF you can also develop. If you can't develop then you're limited to what others provide and if your devices don't have IP control then you're dead before starting without kludging a bunch of other things together just to get to the end goal of controlling a single device.
Sorry, I’ve no experience with Sonos but I know they make devices to add to regular audio systems like PORT it was just an idea, another possibility, for you to investigate.
Sonos Controller is the software for controlling a Sonos sound system. This can be desktop software or the mobile app from Sonos. Some plugins/drivers/apps for automation systems call themselves "Sonos Controller" as well. So the name is just "something that controls your Sonos system".
Sonos is a good sound system. I have several Players (speakers) that I use for various things and integration development with. In the past I would recommend them but today I'm a bit hesitant if the goal is automation. Sonos has been doing tweaks/changes outright stripping of local API control from their system and removing some nice automation integration capabilities from their eco-system at the whim/requests of their media partners (Spotify, Amazon, Google, etc).
The Port is a box you can plugin your existing equipment to and have the audio streamed to the remote Sonos speakers. Nice box and easy setup and controlled via the Mobile app. So if you want to control the music from your phone it's a good solution. I just checked the Sonos Developer site and I don't see an available Cloud API for the Port. There's API for the Players and Home Theater pieces (Beam, Playbar, Base).
I thought that everybody was mad at Sonos about their latest announcement? I don't own Sonos (was planning to buy) so I also don't know the real impact of that announcement.
I'm also still in the market for a solid per room speaker solution which seems to be harder then I thought. Sonos seems to be the only one really capable, but I'm afraid they are going the same way as NEST with regards to controlling by third party. I don't want to invest on something I have to replace in 2 or 3 years.
Their latest announcement was a buggered up foot in mouth experience. The way Sonos handled the announcement and process was more of a problem than what was actually done or will happen.
Today you have options other than Sonos I would say are worth looking at. Denon Heos and Yamaha MusicCast are both wireless systems.
My issue with Sonos is more their software changes they keep doing and their back and forth on API and whether it's local or cloud and the back and forth. Sonos used to be fully capable local control.... then they changed that and in the last year put out a "Cloud API" this was to appease their music partners but the API is only half there and missing A LOT and it's Cloud... This affected everyone even RTI, Creston and Conrol4 integrations. So it's been a back and forth with Sonos. Today... I'm looking for alternatives as well.
I realize that this is an old thread but I thought some of my experience might shed a little light on this subject. I just got my first HE C7 so I'm knee deep in getting things going.
A long time ago I was working on this kind of "stuff" to have my music system programmable from an app.
I have a Sony 400 CD player and it's a great piece of hardware. Yes, I still buy CD's. You know those funny little plastic disks. I have a little device that converts the Sony protocol to serial.
The device you really want to check out though is made by https://www.globalcache.com/.
I have one of their first devices called the GC-100-12/18. It has two serial ports, 3 relay contact jacks and ports for IR transmitter diodes. Best of all is that all these ports are controllable through the RJ45 jack with IP. And it works like a charm.
I don't have any connection to Global Cache, I just like their little device. It is getting pretty long in the tooth but it is a great device for controlling all those difficult to control devices in the audio world.
Yes, I know I could take a Raspi, or one of my ESP32's and do something similar but this way I have a plug and play solution.
Now all I have to do is find an app to control it.
Hope this helps someone else trying to do a similar task.
