New plugin pimatic-sounds

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This plugin is for playing text or a mp3 file on a Google Home or Sonos Device. The plugin uses a text to speech function for playing sentences.

Playing a text or a mp3 file is triggered by the action part of a rule.
The typical command rules are:

1. play text “this is a nice text” vol 50 on mychromecast
2. play file “nice-music.mp3” vol 25 on mychromecast
3. play vol [0-100] on mychromecast

The last command line is for setting the main volume or you could use the optional volume setting per mp3 or text command.

In the plugin you can set the language that is used in the text commands.
Make sure the two are aligned otherwise the Google Home device will sound old fashioned funny.

The plugin is only usable in node v8+ Pimatic systems.
The plugin is available on the plugins page or you can add it in the config

{
  "plugin": "sounds"
}

More info on the plugin page

UPDATE v0.0.12
I renamed the SoundsDevice class to CromecastDevice. This makes it more logical and gives the possibility to add for example the Ikea SYMFONISK.
Let me know if this of interest.

If you already use the plugin on (re)startup of the plugin the SoundsDevice Classname in your config.json is automatically converted to ChromecastDevice

UPDATE v0.0.13
Resume of a playing TuneIn stream after the plugin played a text or file
Removed the stop function

UPDATE v0.0.15
Added Sonos (SYMFONISK) devices
Restructered software to support multiple devices
Added device discover
Usage of variables in text string

UPDATE v0.0.20
Stop casting after text or file announcement
Improved media file typing
Adding variable in filename string

UPDATE v0.0.22
Adding variable for volume control
Added group device for combining Sonos and Chromecast devices to an extra device

Thx for this great plugin. Nice idea the trick with the initSound.mp3 😃

Nice plugin. Works great with Google Home speaker. Thanks for your effort.

A tts command sent to google home interrupts the listening of a radio station.
Is it possible that after the end of the command tts to return automatically to what we listened to before?

I will look into it. You listened to radio by asking GA to tune in to a station?

@bertreb said in New plugin pimatic-sounds:

I will look into it. You listened to radio by asking GA to tune in to a station?

yes

Hi Bert,
as I learned, the discovery function need some time to get the “friendlyName”. Do you know if it ist possible to address the GH by only the “riendlyName” directly. Benefit would be the possibility to address groups to play sounds.
I tested it with a script. It works fine, but the time to discover the available GH is round about 10s for me (I remember such a period as well on you side. Am I right?). This would be to long for every single request.

Hi, the friendly name needs to be discovered or translated to ip on the network and that takes some time. Using the ip address is faster. Thats one of the reasons I skipped the discovery function (mdns). I’m using static ip addresses in my lan so that’s a one time configuration.

Looks good, too bad I cannot install node.js higher than 4.x because of some plugins I use that are not being updated anymore.

But since I’ve installed node-red on a different pi (because of gbridge.io pulling the plug) to use speech control on pimatic I’ve been able to create this in node-red

I’m going to experiment with a test setup of pimatic on a higher node version to see if I can get all plugins to run the way I’d like to.

Hi, you could also use leave the not maintained plugins on the current node 4 pi and install the rest on an other node 10 rpi. You could use the mesh plugin to connect the old rpi to the new one.

@bertreb

Yeah but that would mean I have to keep using and maintaining an extra raspberry pi, I was trying to run it all on 1 pi from ssd.

Even homeduino won’t install on node 10.x for some reason. really have no clue why.

@andi-tudor said in New plugin pimatic-sounds:

@bertreb said in New plugin pimatic-sounds:

I will look into it. You listened to radio by asking GA to tune in to a station?

yes

Hi, i got a solution that will resume a playing audio stream after a Sounds text or audio message. This version only works with TuneIn radio/music streams. Thats the app Google Home uses to stream ‘radio’ stations.

Let me know if you want to test it.

@bertreb

Took the plunge on a complete new installation of Pimatic since I’m recovering from an operation, cannot work at the moment

Got most of pimatic working again on node 10.15, only ledlight (for controlling hyperion) and smartmeter readings are not working now. I guess I need a different smartmeter plugin, have to look into that.
pimatic-led-light is abandoned so that’s too bad. Hue-zll working with your help in another thread, thanks for that!

But this also means I can test Pimatic-sounds. I would love resume tune-in playing!

thanks for all your work and help, really appreciate it!

I publish version 0.0.13 of the Sounds plugin, with the TuneIn resume function.

@djmvt said in New plugin pimatic-sounds:

@bertreb

Took the plunge on a complete new installation of Pimatic since I’m recovering from an operation, cannot work at the moment

Got most of pimatic working again on node 10.15, only ledlight (for controlling hyperion) and smartmeter readings are not working now. I guess I need a different smartmeter plugin, have to look into that.
pimatic-led-light is abandoned so that’s too bad. Hue-zll working with your help in another thread, thanks for that!

But this also means I can test Pimatic-sounds. I would love resume tune-in playing!

thanks for all your work and help, really appreciate it!

Hi for the smartmeters problem you could migrate to Smartmeter3 or Smartmeter-Obis.

@bertreb said in New plugin pimatic-sounds:

Hi for the smartmeters problem you could migrate to Smartmeter3 or Smartmeter-Obis.

trying that but gives me a lot of errors on the rules I had.
Came from pimatic-smartmeter-gas so have to figure out how to migrate.

Thanks for the pimatic-sounds update, will check tomorow!

@djmvt said in New plugin pimatic-sounds:

pimatic-smartmeter-gas

Hi, the conversion problem should ‘only’ be different attribute names.
If its is something else could you provide some error log (i’m the maintainer of smartmeter3 and smartmeter-obis)

Tested the sounds device briefly: seems to work as excpected, nice!

As I’ve seen in this thread speakergroups are not available, also when creating a speaker pair (2 of the same to create stereo sound) it’s also not available as a device.

Will it be possible in the future to add more google devices? we’ve got 5 of them (only speakers, not counting chromecasts). would be nice to add multiple speakers

thanks!

I will look into the group option.
You can already create more than 1 chromecast device. Chromecast is the protocol. Google Home device is also using chromecast.
Or do you mean other type of devices?

@bertreb I mean more google home devices. If I add 1 it works fine, when I add a second home device pimatic crashes with “adress already in use” error:

info [pimatic-sounds]: Device connected
00:07:26warn [pimatic]: Keeping pimatic alive, but could be in an undefined state, please restart pimatic as soon as possible!
00:07:26error [pimatic]: An uncaught exception occurred: Error: listen EADDRINUSE: address already in use :::4321
at Server.setupListenHandle [as _listen2] (net.js:1277:14)
at listenInCluster (net.js:1325:12)
at Server.listen (net.js:1412:7)
at ChromecastDevice.initSounds (/home/pi/pimatic-app/node_modules/pimatic-sounds/pimatic-sounds.coffee:146:9)
at ChromecastDevice.initSounds (/home/pi/pimatic-app/node_modules/pimatic-sounds/pimatic-sounds.coffee:1:1)
at Timeout.startupTime [as _onTimeout] (/home/pi/pimatic-app/node_modules/pimatic-sounds/pimatic-sounds.coffee:95:16)
at ontimeout (timers.js:436:11)
at tryOnTimeout (timers.js:300:5)
at listOnTimeout (timers.js:263:5)
at Timer.processTimers (timers.js:223:10)
This is most probably a bug in pimatic or in a module, please report it!