CQC looked like a nice product for sure. It seems to still be somewhat active even though the main site is down now. Dean certainly seemed dedicated and obviously took care of it like a child. It is certainly sad to see it discontinued. I still see some people are using CQC and then having it talk to HA for things it doesn’t have the drivers for and so forth.
However, it’s not all bad with HA. As long as someone out there has something they want to make work with it and has a little programming knowledge, it’s not too hard to do. There’s only a few of us though that have these Nuvo products I guess. I remember when installing mine years ago when building my home is that it would be something I could probably use practically forever since it has it’s own protocol and serial port. I don’t like any hardware on the cloud because the support never seems to last for too long.
The lovelace is pretty good for making usable interfaces. You can run HA on your iPad and it will work really well. Building what you describe does sound complex though for sure. It would take some custom programming to do some of that. Even if nothing exists, you can easily add shell scripts to run other programs, or there are simple things built in to send data to a serial port for instance. I have an Optoma projector and have been wanting to write an integration for that, but never have got around to it. Getting all of the media into a catalog might be tricky. I’m not sure what could show a picture of a movie and say “This is on DVD player 2, disc 300.” I’d say you could get some help with the community here though.
As far as multiple audio outs, HA does, in my opinion, a pretty bad job of supporting anything locally like that. There’s very little support for sound cards, or at least one with multiple outputs. I am using a USB “sound card” on my server for some things, but it’s just one output. I have the announcements setup on it (also using the Nuvo paging service for that), Pandora integration, and Music Assistant. It might be possible to get multiple outputs to work, however I just never really tried. It seems most don’t use any sound card locally at all, everything is just a streaming device. What I ended up doing was using a couple of Chromecast Audio devices as well. HA can stream to those easily, and just about any music app on any cell phone (most people’s preferred way these days) will work with it too.
Since you seem like me and have a lot of your own music, take a look at Music Assistant. It can help you out there.
It sounds like you are well on your way to getting HA setup and working somewhat, so that is great. To answer your next post, you will need a USB to RS232 adapter unless your NUC has a serial port on it. I hope to add nuvo-simple into the main HACS without the custom repo soon, but for now here is the page for it and how to add it into HA.
I did add the main Concerto features like power, volume, source, bass, treble, and balance but it’s still limited.
[GitHub - brmccrary/nuvo_simple]
