SmartThings, WebCoRE and SONOS

I love my SONOS devices. Problem is that the integration between SmartThings/WebCoRE and SONOS leaves a lot to be desired. Enter jishi’s node-sonos-http-api. A cool and simple NODE.JS that allows you to really fully control SONOS via WebCoRE.

I’ve installed node-sonos-http-api onto a Raspberry Pi, and it acts as a much needed bridge between WebCoRE and SONOS. WebCoRE can send simple URL requests like

http://sonoscontrol/study/play

And trigger specific the Study to play. No big deal right? Well, how about

http://sonoscontrol/study/join/kitchen

This is where things get really useful for me. SmartThings and WebCoRE really don’t have a good way to join SONOS speakers together. Some other commands that node-sonos-http-api offer which SmartThings and WebCoRE don’t have natively include

• Setting the Speaker to use LineIn (TV)
• Track Seek
• Group Mute
• Isolate a Speaker/Room
• Play Favorite
• Play Playlist
• Repeat/Shuffle/Crossfade
• Clear Queue

And the big one for me is

• Text-To-Speech using Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, (plus some other ones including Google) but something other than Amazon Polly

So how? This post will get you up and running quickly on a Raspberry Pi.

You will need:

A Raspberry pi B/B+, 2 and version 3 connected via Ethernet with DHCP

An SD Card

An application such as Win32 Disk Image Writer

An application to extract a gz file

Instructions

Go to http://jishi.github.io/node-sonos-http-api/

Download the image for Raspberry Pi.

Expand the file and get the img

Use the Disk Image Writer to write the img to the SD Card

Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi

Plug the Raspberry Pi into the same network segment as your SONOS devices

Log in (root/with no password)

Determine the IP address

Go to http://%5BIP Address]:5005 and see if you get the following page

If so, you’re done. Some helpful commands to get you started

http://[IP address]:5005/zones

    will list all your available zones

http://[IP address]:5005/[Room Name]/state

will give you the state of a particular room in JSON. Not you can use $response and JSON values to get information (i.e. $response.currentTrack.uri gives you current track info)