New plugin pimatic-sounds

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@bertreb

Installed 0.0.23 just yet: group does not work for me because I can only add the already installed casting devices in pimatic to the group.

I guess we are talking about 3 different things here:

In Google home you can create speaker groups. When you want to cast for example a radiostation to all speakers downstairs you can say “hey Google play 3fm on speakers downstairs”.
Google will then cast the stream to all speakers at once and in sync.

A stereo pair is also an option in Google home. When you have 2 identical devices (2 mini’s, 2 nests mini’s or 2 home speakers) you can tell Google to pair these together. They become a stereo pair then and in the home app there’s only one speaker visible. Volume control on 1 speaker will follow on the second one of the pair.

What you made now in pimatic is grouping of single speakers within pimatic. Of course this is useful if you want to send a casting message or mp3 to multiple devices but these devices still need to be single devices, not paired or grouped in Google home.

So that’s something different.

Long story short: groupdevice doesn’t work with a Google home speakergroup or stereo pair.

As far as I can see the technical side:
A group in Google home has the same ip adress as one of the single devices but with a different port number.
A stereo pair same thing: same address of one of the 2 speakers with a different port number.

Difference between a speaker group and a stereo pair in Google home:
With a group the single devices are still accessible as single devices. With a speaker pair the single devices in that pair are no longer accesible as single devices, the default casting port on each device is no longer allowed to be used.

Lots of info, hope you get what I’m saying haha

@djmvt thanks for the explanation.
I saw already that different port numbers are used for the grouped devices and so it seems for stereo devices also.
The used library is as far as i could detect not capable of handling different port numbers. The port number is hidden in unlaying libs. If the difference is only the port number, it should be possible to get that.
I could make a small hack your to test.

Do you know the port numbers for group and stereo pairs.
If detected port 42956 for a group i’ve made from a google home and a chromecast. But i don’t know if thats the default/standard

Btw the intend of the plugin is an announcement type of usage of the Google Homes and Sonos’s; To let Pimatic alert you via an announcement. Stereo is than an extra but the group devices should be addressable.

@djmvt said in New plugin pimatic-sounds:

@bertreb

Installed 0.0.23 just yet: group does not work for me because I can only add the already installed casting devices in pimatic to the group.

For this i need a discover function that presents gets all group and paired devices available without adding them to Pimatic. The discovery gave errors in a few installations, but i try to find a way to solve that.

So the port-hack of castv2 lib the ‘only’ challenge (for tomorrow )

@bertreb said in New plugin pimatic-sounds:

Do you know the port numbers for group and stereo pairs.
If detected port 42956 for a group i’ve made from a google home and a chromecast. But i don’t know if thats the default/standard

For me there are 3 different port numbers besides 8009: 42149 (stereo pair), 42429 and 42766 (2 groups i’ve made from a different selection of speakers)
Too bad the ports seem to be random because when I delete the stereo pair in google home and recreate the pair again they get a different portnumber. now the stereo pair is at port 42984.

@bertreb said in New plugin pimatic-sounds:

Btw the intend of the plugin is an announcement type of usage of the Google Homes and Sonos’s; To let Pimatic alert you via an announcement. Stereo is than an extra but the group devices should be addressable.

I understand. Hence the confusion I guess: The only reason I would like to see the speakerpair available in the plugin is to integrate it in the announcement rules.

This node-red node is capable of casting to both groups and stereo pairs. Maybe the explanation on how to implement it is found in there?
https://github.com/Hypnos3/node-red-contrib-cast

Hi, thanks.
I found a hackless way to use different port numbers, so thats good news. Discovery seems the only way to get the dynamic assigned port numbers. So that’s really for tomorrow

Seems that play file results always in stereo mode.

I have created two rules. One should handle to play sound on two GH (kitchen and living room) in stereo mode depending of motion detection in the kitchen. The other should play only on the living room GH. For play text it works fine.

Hi, I found another solution for device discovery and implemented that in version 0.0.24
Because of the discovery the Groups and Pairs are now available.
You see them when you push the discovery. Select and add them as a ChromeCastDevice not a GroupsDevice! The GroupsDevice is still available. That device is for making a group out of multiple independent devices (chromcast and sonos)

The replay after announcement is not working for grouped devices that are playing via “hey Google play …” on one of the group devices. If you stream a TuneIn channel via the app to the group the replay should work.
There’s a lot to test, so i released an alfa version for testing of the different configurations and scenarios. If you do not want to test and take the risk of bugs, DO NOT INSTALL THIS VERSION (0.0.24). After testing a stable version will be available.

I will go for a test. Thx for the update.

Did you have seen any possibility to detect the last voice command activated GH during your work on the plugin. This is possible for Echo speakers, but I currently found no way for such info. A epoch timestamp would be enough, but there seems to be nothing like that.

Good luck and have fun with the testing.

Btw the replay will work if you ask google to play a TuneIn station on <name speaker group>

The last voice command via a Chromecast api seems not possible. App’s are sandboxed and isolated. Voice Assistant and Chromecast are different apps.
You can see your (last) activities on https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity.

First results:
Grouping works and output is sync.
Important to know is when you change the group config by adding or deleting GH, then the port change, so the old group is not longer valid. At least that’s what my short test showed.

Groups have the same name in the discovery, that little bit tricky:

After playing a file this messages pops up:

More results will follow…

What is different the name or ID of a group? or what is the unique id?
The port change should be updated also in the device?

Both devices are identical from name and ID point of view:

This time it works. There was something strange in the constellation, because after my second try the pimatic-frontend stops to work. After a restart of pimatic and readding the groups it works fine. Even the group adaption works and the group stays valid.

The 2 device look like they are the name and the id of the same device. The number is the compressed without dots, IP address

For th test i made 2 groups with the same devices and they are discovered like this

20:41:32.360 [pimatic-sounds] Found ip: 192.168.1.44, port: 42897, label: Google Cast Group
20:41:32.361 [pimatic-sounds] Found ip: 192.168.1.44, port: 42494, label: Google Cast Group

To differentiate i can use the port number or the Friendly name should be there also

I improved the naming in the discovery with the FriendlyName (if available) -> version 0.0.25
The update of the port number is under construction

Sorry haven’t been able to test anything tonight because I’ve crashed part of my pimatic installation with installing tuya-convert (tasmoto flash tool) on my pimatic pi. For some reason that killed homeduino.

But everything is up and running again, will test tomorrow

Thanks man!

Haven’t been testing a lot last day but all seemed stable, stereo pair is added, groups are visible in discovery.

Did notice the google devices do not get updated properly when stopping a playing TuneIn stream for instance. Once I start another stream the info on the device in pimatic gets updated.

Also resume volume doesn’t seem to work? (Maybe I missed something in the comments).

Great job man, this plugin is getting better and better!

Found a bug in the friendlynames when using discovery:

The friendlyname id contains invalid characters when adding a new device. One of my groups is called “speakers beneden”. Normally the id will fill the spaces or invalid characters with a - but it didn’t on the last part of the name (the “friendly” part).

Only some cosmetic stuff, I don’t use the Sonos devices from this plugin, but if possible it would be helpful to display the name instead of the IP (wthout dots) in the devices discovery like you did it for the GH groups.

Otherwise it seems to work well. The announcement reactions are pretty fast. From time to time it hangs a little bit, but I think I need simply a HW update (to much VMs are running…).

Hi, thanks for testing. I created an update.
The discovery names are better readable

Im now using the id from Chromecast to make devices unique. The ip and the port can change, but this id stays the same (see example)

The ip and port number are discovered, filled in and updated automatically in the device config after a discovery.

The update is still not finished, but for now it’s like; when your change you devices config via the Home App, do a discovery and the IP and Port numbers should be updated.

Replay of TuneIn streaming should work (incl volume restore) when you do an announcement on the same device(s) where the streaming is running on.

The new test version is 0.0.27