Hey y’all,
I’m a tech working for MicroNova, usually I just build and test the AmpliPro’s for production. But I’ve been tasked with learning how to use Home Assistant with an AmpliPro and then write about it. Here are the three Home Assistant related blog posts I’ve written:
Part 1 How-to set up the integration: Home Assistant and AmpliPro: Getting Started with Automated Home Audio – AmpliPro blog
Part 2 How-to set up the custom dashboard cards: Home Assistant and AmpliPro: Dashboard Cards, Media Control, and Automation – AmpliPro blog
Part 3 How-to set up some basic Automations: Home Assistant and AmpliPro: Automations – AmpliPro blog
I’m making this post in part to advertise that these blog posts exist, but also to hopefully answer some questions you may have. For example, creating an automation that plays your Pandora stream in the kitchen, it wasn’t exactly obvious how to set that up. It’s probably because the media player action ‘Select Source’ is used to call up AmpliPi’s ‘streams’ and its ‘sources 1-4’
The automation post will walk you through all that.
I’m also making this post to solicit feedback and questions that aren’t answered by these blog posts. I’ll answer any questions I can. With the ones I can’t, I intend to use those responses to help guide me on what to write about next.
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These cards look to really really help out in HA-- I’m excited to try them out this weekend!
I’m curious how others may be handling this issue or if it’s a possible bug? The situation:
I have an automation that triggers whenever the outward facing doors open/close (Front Door, Back Patio, Garage Door) to play a specific sound when it opens, and another when it closes. The automation triggers it to the announce channel on all of the public speaker areas in the house.
The Problem:
When I am also playing music during the day on the public speakers- if the door is open/closed faster than the “door open” automation takes to run…it will trigger the “door close” automation but not return back to playing music. It will just simply mute and remove all those zones from playing.
Would there be a way to have that not happen or to have the announce channel overlay over the stream instead of completely erasing it? Maybe like if the speaker is on Stream/Source 1 playing, that audio goes down a bit but the Announce channel overlays and then it goes back to what it was doing?
Another thing I’d like to see is a card for each source where I could easily checkbox/select and unselect zones in that source. The Source card just shows you which zones are currently in there, but does not allow you to add…you have to use the Zone or Group cards simultaneously.
I believe I have a solution for the issue you’re having with the door open/closing announcements. First, I’ll explain what it’s doing.
When an announcement is played, a snapshot of the current state of the AmpliPro is taken, to execute the announcement, the state changes, once complete it goes back to the previous state. The state of the AmpliPro being all the current active streams, zones, volume levels, etc..
What’s happening in your situation is the second ‘door closing’ announcement is taking that snapshot while the first announcement is still running. Which means it kills all the streams and music you were playing by staying in the announcement state.
A viable long term solution is in the works, but until then I suggest using a work around. For your door closing automations add a delay of a few seconds before it starts the announcement.. I’m guessing it only needs to be a few seconds, but that depends on how long the first announcement takes to complete.
Automations > + Building Blocks > Wait for time to pass (delay)
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As far as your suggestion about the cards. I agree, having a checkbox/select option would be great. And it would sort of eliminate the need for a zone card, giving you a more all in one dashboard card. I’m going to ask around and see what sort of a lift it would take to get that done.
Thanks for the suggestion.