CAST-1 Sendspin players don't reconnect to Music Assistant

ESPHome
1

Greetings,
None of the topic categories seemed quite right (no Music Assistant nor SendSpin), so I put it here because that’s what the hardware is. Feel free to reassign elsewhere if need be.

I bought a handful of the Apollo Automation’s CAST-1’s:-
https://apolloautomation.com/products/cast-1-audio-casting-device

I’m very pleased with them and I could write a long post on all the reasons. But that’s not this post. :grin:

Here’s my one issue and I’m wondering if anyone else knows a fix for this.

If for any reason, I restart Music Assistant - whether that’s restarting the service, upgrading Music Assistant, or upgrading/rebooting Home Assistant - the CAST-1’s simply do NOT ever come back online until I manually reboot them.

The devices are still on the network. I can still ping them and open up their webpage. As far as I can tell, this isn’t a CAST-1 problem so much as it is that Home Assistant / Music Assistant seems to just never repoll for those Sendspin devices. I’ve got other music players, and some take a few minutes after a reboot to reconnect, but they all do except the CAST-1’s. (I should mention that these are the only Sendspin devices I have so I don’t entirely know if it’s a Sendspin issue with CAST-1’s or all Sendspin devices.)

I’ve got two wireless CAST-1’s and two using the ethernet plug add-on. They all do it.

Anyone know what’s going on? I don’t even know where to start with troubleshooting because it’s when the Music Assistant service restarts it’s like it just doesn’t even try to find the Sendspin CAST-1 players so there’s nothing at all in the logs that seems interesting.

Thanks!

2

As far as I am aware, sendspin esp devices connect using MDNS, so I would check there first, maybe router or something but don’t ask me anymore than that as its way beyond my abilities.

All my sendspin devices reconnect if MA is rebooted without issue, if that helps.

3

Thanks. That does help. Maybe it isn’t entirely on one side or the other then. I’m not sure about the MDNS but I can look into it. On my IoT network, every MAC is given a set DHCP IP so that everything always stays the same. But I can tinker with that.
Also, Home Assistant just dropped a release:-

I won’t be able to mess with that until this weekend, but there was something interesting in the ESPHome that I wonder if it will help :man_shrugging:

ESPHome devices can now open the connection to Home Assistant themselves, so they work even when Home Assistant can’t reach them directly.

4

Upgraded to HA 2026.10. Initial results were very promising. The Sendspin devices came back after HA rebooted! Did another restart and they came back! Huzzah.

Updated Music Assistant to 2.10.6 and… they didn’t come back. :cry:
Restart Music Assistant and… they didn’t come back. :weary_face:

But it does appear that they come back with HA reboots so :man_shrugging:

Also, another big improvement :- the “press to reboot” button on HA works! So I can do that instead of going around and reseating power! :confetti_ball:

So it looks like there are plenty of improvements in 2026.10, but still a bit to go with Music Assistant.

5

Apart from the integration MA is separate thing to HA. So are the sendspin devices not connecting to MA, HA or both?

6

If I restart MA (or update), then MA does not find the devices again until I restart the devices (either pull plug, restart from HA, or restart from the device webpage). They continue to report into HA (though I did have some earlier issues that I can no longer reproduce on HA 2026.10 which is why that portion has been a success).

Thanks!