As part of my current setup I have a linux Desktop (debian) computer as one of the sources that I use to drive music throughout my house. The issue with using this desktop is it is located on a different floor to where most of the daily activities take place. If the phone rings, or someone is at the door, or a song comes on that I want to turn up, until now I have not had the ability to control this remote computer.
Well… necessity is the mother of invention so I thought I would create an mqtt client that would start when the computer boots and add some volume controls to my lovelace dashboard so I can remotely control the computer audio. This topic is the result of my efforts. I thought there may be some others in the community that could utilize this effort so I have uploaded the necessary files to github here.
This includes all the sensor and lovelace configurations to run this system.
The prerequisites are…
- you must have an mqtt broker that the system can utilize.
- your system must be running linux
- install the necessary pip files paho-mqtt and pyalsaaudio
- place the rvc.py application on your linux based computer and configure it to start when the system loads.
- update the rvc.py program with the ip address and port of your mqtt broker
- add the sensor, binary sensor, and lovelace control to your HA system
Enjoy!