How to connect to a second Raspberry Pi from Home Assistant?

Hardware
1

Hi all.

I’m trying to connect to a second Raspberry Pi on my network from Home Assistant. My plan is to use it in conjunction with a non-smart speaker to broadcast announcements in the house.

I’ve tried a few solutions but none of them have working.

Can anyone point me to a walkthrough on how to do this?

Cheers!

2

Have you done a Google Search ?

Building a rasPI music player doesn’t have a lot to do with Home Assistant…
Get one running that can be controlled.

You are probably better off just doing Music Assistant

3

Hi, welcome to the forum!

IMHO, I think by using a RPi, it’s not the best platform to use for announcements and a Home Assistant VPE probably will be cheaper, easier to use, more versatile, less power hungry, faster, …

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Yeah, I’ve performed many Google searches, my use case is specifically based around having a spare Raspberry Pi knocking around and wanting to get some use out of it, but it’s starting to look like far more trouble than it’s worth.

The idea is not to build a music player neccessarily, I’d just get a Sonos for that. I have Music Assistant, Plex, a few other apps, but this is really for announcements to make the kids aware of the passage of time in the morning before school, times for violin practice, automations, event triggers, that sort of thing.

Thanks for the Discord link - it’s not working for me, however.

5

You either need active speakers or a HAT which definitely will make it more bulkier as well on top of the aforementioned downsides.

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Try it again (if you are at all interested) I edited it.
(But it should have worked ¯\(ツ)/¯ )

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Hi Nick. Thanks for the welcome! :slight_smile:

I’m already pretty much in agreement that RPi is a whole lot of trouble to setup (though I like to tinker).

I did look into VPE - it looks pretty solid as a controller/announcer, but I’d like several speakers around the house (that we already have) and wanted to see if I could make use out of those with a few Pi Zeros, but I’ve already wasted 2 days trying to get it to work and I’m not getting that close to my goals.

I think I might just get a VPE (or a couple) and use them multi-room.

Thanks for the advice, all. I’ll let you know how successful I am!

Cheers.

8

Just bought the HA VPE. Thanks for the nudge in that direction - it’ll give the kids something fun to play around with as well. I’ll post my thoughts here if anyone’s interested.

I shall place the RPi as an ornament in my fish tank as a monument to the vagaries of technology. Or something.

9

I’ve used:
https://www.picoreplayer.org/

on an old Pi much like you with good luck. In my case, I was actually using it to connect to a BT speaker and pull it into Music Assistant. Surprisingly pretty straightforward and easy (and worked great). Although I also don’t really use it anymore. Ha

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Very interested, thanks. I want to get a bit deeper into Music Assistant, I’d like a decent player on my dash and have that up on some wall tablets. Thanks again!

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I use and old Rpi as a remote zwave hub.

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