Over this short xmas to new years break I’m just starting to learn about home automation and I picked up a vera lite from amazon during the $150 deal and have some various sensors and a door lock coming in the next few days.
A requirement my wife would like is audio announcements heard throughout the house when a door opens or closes or locks and unlocks. I’m trying to understand what my options are for accomplishing this without spending a ton of money. If i dropped 200 bucks on indigo, i could just broadcast the events through airfoil to cheap airplay endpoints (i have a few raspberry pis already) I already have a osx server on 24/7 as a media server, but paying 200 bucks for more software seems like a rook after buying a veralite. I also know i could do this with the sonos plug in and a couple of play 1s, one on each floor, but again thats 200 per sonos minimum and i’d prob buy the bridge cause i dont know if placement would be right by wired ports.
Anyone have a cheaper solution? I have a NAS running, so the announcements could stored on the NAS for access. I’m hoing to keep extra power draw low as well, i.e. keeping full computers on as player endpoints doesnt seem reasonable… although i have xtra old computers…
Lots of data out there, and i’m reading constanly… but I’m hoping someone has already tackled this and can just lay it all out for me.
Interesting, leaving the PI on 24/7/365 is def a good way to go in my opinion…
Will the XMBC put audio out over the 2.5 jack, or do i need external speakers from the HDMI?
I’m assuming I can have two pis running and getting events at the same time? one on each floor?
I’m going to read up on that plug in right now. Going to install my first sensors tonight, door sensor and schlage lock. I have some dimmers coming next week.
The stereo jack should be fine. If you want to send to additional RPi’s then each would need its own plugin instance installed. After doing that then you’d use the advanced tab of a scene to send TTS or a pre defined MP3 to each instance.
There might a slight delay between each one firing though, and to minimize this, it might be better to use an MP3 rather than TTS.
Taking an idea from the “what did you do with Vera today” thread, I guess you could also use one device like an RPi or tablet, and then maybe multiple wireless speakers.
While you’ve already mentioned it, I’m a big fan of the Sonos set up, it’s easy to integrate and you kind of get a lot of things all in one, built in speakers, it’s wireless, It integrates seamlessly into Vera (as you can control sonos via your Vera), you have multi-room for whole house playback and it’s a really good sound system for just listing to music.
Also keep in mind the option of TTS (text to speech) in that you can script Vera to send the ‘say’ commands so that e.g Sonos speaks them (potentially removing the need for any specific files on a NAS) and if you look at some of the scripting that’s been done - it can be set up to be quite dynamic based on thing like the time of day or any device variables Vera holds that you want to throw at it.
Cost wise it is not cheap, even the low end S1 but it does just plug and play.
You’ll find a number of great suggestions in this forum to use PIs or PCs, but for me the simplicity of the Sonos (coupled with the fact I already had a couple for music) was a major factor.
Hope that is of interest, I know it’s not your focus at this stage, but considering how much I use my sonos (especially the Mrs) it’s been a great investment.
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