Hey everyone.
I have my homeassistant setup. Something I’m looking to do is a simple alarm clock, slowly turning up my LED strip, and gradually say turning on music in 1% increments. But I really haven’t had much luck coming up with a not silly $100 + system to, just have a music player that hass can control. I have a basic bottom line tablet in our bedroom set up as a home assistant dashboard. we have a paid spotify account.
But I’m kind of losing my head trying to wrap around exactly what or how to actually get a controllable system. that can be set up in my bedroom without any costly additions to my bedroom. We have plenty of bluetooth speakers, but to my knowledge all of them require actually turning them on manually if they weren’t playing music before. Which kind of negates their value for an alarm clock.
This is pretty easy to DIY.
Esp32, PCM5102 DAC, and a small speaker.
ESPHome media player, the music either on Spotify via MusicAssistant or simply in a local folder on home assistant. You can adjust the speaker volume via the pcm5102.
Hell, wire an i2s microphone to it also and you have a voice assistant satellite.
Either you have a smart speaker that is controlled by HA, or you have dumb speakers connected to something smart that is controlled by HA.
Ordinary Bluetooth speakers are dumb so they need to be left on and connected. Can your tablet run some kind of audio server in the background?
Look into a raspberry pi with Volumio. You can play music through the headphone jack that way (assuming you get a Pi with a headphone jack).
Home Assistant has a Volumio integration but I’m not sure what it’s capable of. You can also run Music Assistant (available as a HA add-on), with which you can set up Volumio as a DLNA player. You’ll have to try it out and see if volume control is available, but I can tell you that using Music Assistant with Chromecast lets me control volume through Home Assistant.
Edit: maybe a pipe dream, but maybe Music Assistant can control the Spotify app on your tablet? Only one way to find out.
+1 for this.
I have a Volumio pi with a DAC board directly connected to speakers
Volumio has the built-in ability to start playing a playlist as an alarm, but not ramp the volume
HA can definitely control Volumio’s volume so this seems like a good starting point.
I might even try when I’m home next.
You can also use Plex Meets Homeassistant if you make the pi a plex player.
Supporting a product does this is one thing.
Making it work is another
One is easier than the other.
