Automation with Home Assistant

[Pokerbarlo]

If anyone from WiiM is reading this. I am sure this advice will bring in a lot of sales and beat Bluesound Node to a pulp. Since your target market are the more technical, practical and objective side of the home audio industry. Who like science good measurements and technical data. It would be wise to target the same type of people in the Smart Home Automation side of things. I am part of both.

Most objective, technical and practical Smart Home Enthusiats use Home Assistant because it is open source and works with high quality low priced devices like Zigbee. If you guys can get your streamers integrated into the Home Assistant eco system wherein clients can create automations that trigger certain songs or playlists in any music zone in their house I am sure you will be selling more than 3 to unlimited units per client.

Imagine these scenarios:
1. Home intrusion triggers motion, window, door and camera sensors then Home Assistant plays Highway to hell in all zones at high volume.
2. Person forgets to turn off the oven, stove or some appliance the Home Assistant plays a certain song in whichever room the client is as a reminder.
3. At a certain time Home Assitant plays dinner playlist at the dinning room zone

Automation with Home Assistant and other smart devices can be endless.

 

[whereyoubeen]

Still, had expected a bit more from WiiM in HA.

Would still be nice to at least see an image of what is playing in my dashboard and be able to simply turn off the device when the last person leaves the house.

HI there, did you check out the "old" unofficial linkplay HA integration? I have a wiim amp and a few other linkplay speakers successfully integrated with that and it works flawless since a few years. So while the official integration is still kind of useless, the old one still works and provides extensive features.

 

[Lomax_hjs]

HI there, did you check out the "old" unofficial linkplay HA integration? I have a wiim amp and a few other linkplay speakers successfully integrated with that and it works flawless since a few years. So while the official integration is still kind of useless, the old one still works and provides extensive features.

Haven't found the old HA integration, where do I look?

 

[criticowl]

Haven't found the old HA integration, where do I look?

LinkPlay

Connect and control your LinkPlay media players using the LinkPlay integration

www.home-assistant.io

It works alright for controlling basic things like transport controls (play/stop/pause/etc) and it's what I use to trigger some sounds being played through speakers as workaround for not having a real "smart speaker" built yet. I plan to make smart speaker using an esphome32 device in the future though as I only plan to use the WiiM devices as Roon (RAAT) endpoints. Plus, it the 12v trigger isn't fast enough to turn on an amp, play the sound, and turn off for smart speaker use...

 

[Lomax_hjs]

That one was automatic installed ones HA saw the Amp.
Did noticed just now that the Amp is twice visible and if I use the other in my dashboard I get the album cover visible

 

[whereyoubeen]

Haven't found the old HA integration, where do I look?

You have to manually add it via hacs and reading the documentation is kind of required to get it working, but it's still great:

GitHub - nagyrobi/home-assistant-custom-components-linkplay: LinkPlay based media devices integration for Home Assistant.

LinkPlay based media devices integration for Home Assistant. - nagyrobi/home-assistant-custom-components-linkplay

github.com

Unfortunately when the "official" integration dropped, the "old and awesome" one was archived, while the new one was absolutely not ready to replace it. And there has not been much progress so far. But that old integration still works flawless and provides pretty much any feature you expect from a media player integration and more. For example you can have unlimited presets with it, as it allows defining your own custom sources. I also have extensive grouping automations set up with it, like automatic volume levels, smart grouping with motion sensors, TTS announcements and so on and it always just works. Hopefully the official integration catches up some day, so far it kind of sucks.