Category: sonos

Controlling Sonos from a Particle Photon using a Sonos API on a Pi 3

In the previous article, Control Sonos with a easy to use API, we configured a Docker container on a Raspberry Pi 3 to run an easy to use Sonos API. I prefer this solution over writing code on the Photon to control Sonos. Now it is time to let the Photon talk to the API on the PI 3 to load a playlist and start playing or to stop playing at the press of a button.

Just create a new app with the Particle Build IDE and call the app SonosCtrl. Then add the following library: HttpClient. After adding the library, make sure you have the following includes:

image

To actually use HttpClient to make requests to the Sonos API, you will need some variables of specific types:

image

You will use the request variable to configure the request. When you configure request, you will need to specify a hostname or an IP address. I used the IP address of my RPi 3 (SonosController above).

To configure request:

image

The above just sets the port and IP address for the request. We do this in the setup() function. When we press a button, we toggle between playing from a playlist or pausing the Sonos:

image

By setting the request path appropriately, we can easily load a Sonos playlist or pause. See the GitHub page at https://github.com/jishi/node-sonos-http-api for more paths to use. There is much more you can do! Above, we target a specific Sonos Player (Living Room). As you can see, this is very simple to do and keeps the Particle Photon code cleaner. The code is kept pretty simple so no error handling, logging etc… You can find the full code in the following Gist: https://gist.github.com/gbaeke/9c185e82e7f23c0c4c9d803990d3660f. Have fun!!!

Control Sonos with an easy to use API

In an earlier post, Controlling Sonos from a Particle Photon, we created a small app to do just that. The app itself contained some C++ code to interact with a Sonos player on your network. Although the code works, it does not provide you with full control over your Sonos player and it’s tedious to work with.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had an API at your disposal that is both easy to use and powerful? And even better, has Sonos discovery built-in so that there is no need to target Sonos players by their IP? Well, look no further as something like that exists: https://github.com/jishi/node-sonos-http-api. The Sonos HTTP API is written in Node.js which makes it easy to run anywhere!

And I do mean ANYWHERE!!! I wanted to run the API as a Docker container on my Raspberry Pi 3, which is very easy to do. Here are the basic steps I took to configure the Raspberry Pi:

With Docker up and running, I created a Dockerfile and built the image. Here is the Dockerfile:

FROM hypriot/rpi-node
RUN git clone -q https://github.com/jishi/node-sonos-http-api.git
WORKDIR node-sonos-http-api
RUN npm install > /dev/null
EXPOSE 5005
CMD [“npm”,”start”]

Note: a Raspberry Pi uses an ARM architecture which means you need to use ARM compatible images; above I used hypriot/rpi-node (see https://hub.docker.com/r/hypriot/rpi-node/)

Note 2: I’m sure there already is a Docker image for this Sonos API; I just decided to build it myself

After building the image, I tagged it sonosctrl (using docker tag). You will see the tag of this image coming back later when we run the container.

Because the API server needs to discover the Sonos devices on the network, you should not use the Docker bridge network. The command to run the container from the sonosctrl image:

docker run –net=host –restart=always -d –name SonosController sonosctrl

Now you should have a container called SonosController up and running that accepts API requests to control your Sonos:

image

Note: you also see Portainer running above; I use that to get an easy GUI for Docker on this Pi

To actually test the API, use Postman or cURL. From Postman:

image

Above, you see a request to load the Sonos playlist called “car” on players in “Living Room”. The request was successful as can be seen in the response. This command will also start playing songs from the playlist right away. If you want to pause playing:

image

Great! We have a Sonos API running on a Raspberry Pi as a Docker container with a few simple steps. We can now more easily send commands to Sonos from devices like the Particle Photon or an Arduino. I will show you how to do that from a Particle Photon using the HttpClient library in a later article.

Controlling Sonos from a Particle Photon

Now for something fun! Let’s control a Sonos from a Particle Photon and a connected button. I connected a Grove Button to the Particle with simple male-to-female wires. The SIG line on the button should go to a digital port (D0 in my case). When the button is pressed, the port will read HIGH and otherwise LOW.

Controlling Sonos is another matter though. Sonos should really make simple APIs available and/or provide access through IFTTT and similar services. Until they do that, you will need to control Sonos the hard way, by connecting directly to it from the Particle and sending commands over their HTTP interface. Luckily, the people from Hover Labs, have some code on GitHub that you can build upon. I simply copied their code in my Particle app and removed references to the Hover device. By the way, the Hover is a cool device in its own right that you should definitely check out as well!

image

In the above snippet, you see part to the loop() code that checks for a button press. Since we want to toggle between Sonos PLAY and PAUSE, there’s some code for that. The hard work is done by the sonos() function which takes commands like PLAY, PAUSE, NEXT, PREVIOUS. You can check out the full code in the following gist: https://gist.github.com/gbaeke/240fb221204ff828dec06150014ec5fd. Note that the code also contains the LED and photoresitor code from earlier examples. The Sonos control is also very basic as it only implements PLAY and PAUSE so you need something in the queue. But at least you have a start to create more complex interactions.

You could also create a Particle Function that executes the Sonos code which would enable you to control your Sonos from the cloud and even connect this with other services via IFTTT. For instance, you could start playing your Sonos when you are arriving home.

Have fun controlling Sonos from your Particle!!!

%d bloggers like this: