I’m really happy to announce that for the past many months, I’ve been working with @S10XtremeNLow and HTD to officially bring not only the MCA66 to Home Assistant, but their Lync products as well!!
Both the Lync 6 and Lync 12 will be added as officially supported devices by this integration. I know there’s been a huge interest in this and I’m very happy I can announce this now and a plan as to which you all can expect.
This will be an official integration recognized by HTD. They have been amazing at helping me get support for everyone. We will continue to be working together to ensure that this integration thrives. My end goal is to merge this integration directly into Home Assistant core so we do not have to rely on HACS.
I have been really busy rewriting the integration from the ground up! Stability has been the center of it all and I must have gone through dozens of iterations of communicating with the gateway. I’m really proud at how good it’s become and I can’t wait to actually share it.
I will start a preview/beta period within the next couple of weeks so you all can get a hand on it and help me test it.
There are going to be some new notable features with this new version. The obvious being the same integration will support both MCA and Lync products out of the box.
The integration will support config_flow going forward, no more yaml configuration! Your HTD device will automatically get discovered via Home Assistant’s device detection and setup is even easier than before.
There are some other enhancements such as setting the bass, treble, balance, zone/source names and such that I will also be supporting.
The end result of the integration is a huge collaboration from lots of different people in the community, even some who have no idea they’ve been a huge help. So thank you to those who have made this possible.
Thank you for letting us know hikirsch! I have a Lync 12 and would be more than happy to test or help out in any way I can.
Really looking forward to this. The HTD integration is by far the weakest point in my Home Assistant setup compared to where I came from in HomeSeer. This should put everything up ahead of what I had there with the exception of the Onkyo integration, which while not as nice, is still meeting my needs great.
Thanks for sharing! Yes, this is interesting, unfortunately the Lync/MCA devices would need to rely on some sort of Source for this to work. An automation could auto-select the source and such. But out of the box hardware wise, you’re not quite there for something like this. Look at the Wiim or another Cast device for support with your music service.
I’ll be reaching out to this thread hopefully soon with plans for testing. I love everyone’s interest. Hang tight, we’re almost there!
I use a couple of Chromecast Music devices with mine. They don’t sell them anymore, but they still work great and are a perfect match for an HTD system.
One thing I would love to do is use Text to Speech to play announcements over the speakers. However, currently when I try this I get an error. Do you know if the new integration will support this?
Entity media_player.living_room_speakers does not support action media_player.play_media.
I will be supporting that action but it will be to play media from the MP3 player attached to the device. These devices cannot support the use case you want directly. Like what I am suggesting to @harshl You need to source to stream th TTS to, choose that as a source, and then it should work.
@harshl I use a chromecast device as well. Works well to access Spotify Connect.
@hikirsch yes it’s almost like a limitation for certain setups with HTD since it requires a physical source for the music. I was hoping the new HTD integration would somehow bridge the gap since Music Assistant seems to be able to access Chromecast devices and makes use of media_player.play_media. Not sure how that would work though, but in theory it would give a user access and control of their Spotify library from within HA.
Your suggestion to look into the WiiM seems to be the same as using a Chromecast, unless I am missing something?
Without using Musci Assistant, HA provides access to the Chromcast, which in-turn essentially accesses my spotify library. I have basic control of the Chromecast from HA, but I still need to search Spotify using my phone. Not ideal but it works.
I use it to play Spotify playlists directly from Home Assistant. It references the playlist and sends it to the Chromecast of my choosing based on the automations I have written.
