HA intercom advice

Hardware
1

I’m not sure if intercom is the correct word to use here, because I really don’t care about two way communication, but I want HA to be able to select a speaker by room and send output to that speaker. I have no idea what technology is out there on the speaker side of the house. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on the speakers. At first I was thinking just some simple bluetooth paired speakers but they all seem to want to drop the pair with my RPI if the RPI isn’t actively talking to them and I’m not sure how to go about directing the output to one bluetooth device over another. Any thoughts??

2

Have you looked at chrome cast audios? That is what I am using in my Repo.

3

Chip, take a look at this post; it may give you some ideas.

4

That’s awesome. My thought is to put one of these in each of the kids rooms so that I can tie them into HA for weather alerts and the alarm clock. I know the kids will figure out quickly enough that they can stream music to it from their phone as well. So how does chromecast deal with multiple sources coming at it? I’m assuming it can easily based on the advertisements.

5

I haven’t set this up yet, but you can ask the OP.

6

By default a new source overrules the current source (and unfortunately doesn’t ‘restore’ the previous source like Sonos does).

1 Like
7

Thanks
I obviously don’t have one of these yet, so forgive me for continuing to pick your mind here. What is involved in “casting” something to this? How easy is it to establish and later re-establish another session? For example, if my kids are playing their songs through it and I can hear it downstairs. What would be involved for HA to either take over enough of the controls to reduce the volume, or interrupt the stream to tell them to turn it down and then for them to re-establish their own stream?

8

No problem at all! I partly learned by asking a lot of questions myself.

Like I said, unfortunately the “restore” feature doesn’t exist. I guess you can create one yourself for internet streams (save and then restart after) but I can’t think of an idea how to deal with that if you send content from a tablet or phone for instance.

9

Thanks for helping out - @turboc is a great guy and gives a lot back.

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10

That’s easy, you can just send commands for that which will not interrupt the stream.

      -  service: media_player.volume_set
         data:
           entity_id: media_player.ca_livingroom
           volume_level: '0.30'

You can also adjust the volume in the frontend with sliders.

You can even pauze play if you like.

11

I like that. I can put a decibel meeter and if the sound is over a certain amount I can have HA turn down the volume on them. :slight_smile: This sounds like it may be a good solution. I can have HA play specific music to wake them up, and intermix it with HA yelling at them to get out of bed. My kids are in their 20’s so yelling and harassing them is legal now.

12

Hehe, good luck with that. I expect they are smart enough to pull the power plug from the speaker as soon as they go to bed :slight_smile:

13

Never under estimate the stupidity of college freshmen. LOL

1 Like