If you have a Busch-Jäger Busch-Radio iNet installed somewhere in your home, you’ve probably already searched for a Home Assistant integration and come up empty. I did too.
What I did find was a post in the ioBroker community where someone had reverse-engineered the radio’s protocol and documented it well enough to build a working adapter. That documentation became the foundation for this integration – I used it as a starting point and built the HA integration from scratch with the help of Claude.ai.
The result surprised me a bit. The radio has a proper HTTP API and sends UDP push notifications when its state changes. Touch the volume knob physically? HA knows instantly, no polling involved. That’s fully local_push.
What the integration does:
The radio shows up as a media player. Turn it on/off, set volume, pick a station, configure settings (yes!)
For the settings, you can expose device settings as HA entities – brightness, contrast, EQ preset, sleep timer, alarm time, timezone offset. That is off by default and needed to be enabled in the Integration Settings.
For now-playing info, the radio’s API doesn’t expose artist or song data directly. The integration works around that by opening the station stream itself and reading the ICY metadata. When artist and title are known, it fetches the matching album cover (iTunes first, MusicBrainz as fallback). If only the station is known, it looks up the station logo from radio-browser.info. No API key, no account needed.
A note on the hardware:
This is a niche device – a wall-mounted internet radio from the European/German market, model 8216 U. If you have one, you know exactly what it is. If this is the first time you’re hearing about it, this integration probably isn’t for you or you are now going to get one.
There is no other wall-radio with HA integration, at least I couldn’t find one.
GitHub: Installation: HACS custom repository → https://github.com/moerk-o/ha-busch-radio-inet
Requires UDP port 4242 on the HA host and the radio’s port 4244 reachable from HA.
This is the initial release. If you have one of these and run into anything – good or bad – I’d love to hear about it. Have Fun!
