I’ve been working on a new proximity feature for MassDroid.
The whole reason I started building it was that I wanted room-aware playback, but I really didn’t want to end up with a giant pile of presence automations, helper entities, and room
logic just to move music between speakers.
So I tried going in the other direction: let the app figure out the room directly.
It uses BLE fingerprints from devices that already exist around the house, like TVs, speakers, routers, and other fixed BLE devices, so there’s no dedicated beacon setup.
I also added an automated calibration wizard where you just go room by room, walk around with your phone for a bit, and it builds the room fingerprints automatically.
What I wanted from it was basically:
- no complex automation setup
- no extra hardware
- low battery overhead
- reliable room detection after calibration
Once calibrated, the app can:
- detect the room you’re in
- suggest moving playback to that room’s speaker
- auto-transfer playback if enabled
- apply room-specific playback behavior
A few screenshots:
Repo: MassDroid
I’m also thinking about adding Home Assistant integration, so MassDroid can read existing presence / occupancy sensors over the HA WebSocket API and let you bind them to rooms as extra
context for detection.
Also, outside of the proximity feature, I’ve been adding a bunch of other stuff to the app lately around music discovery and metadata enrichment too, like genre-specific radio, browsing
the library by genre, Smart Mix, and similar features.