Sonos state trigger

Other Devices & Integrations Home Theater & Smart Speakers
1

Hi,

I have quite a number of Sonos ZP80/90’s running into a number of power amplifiers for house-wide audio.

I don’t want the amplifiers to stay on all the time, as it would use a large amount of power. So, using the Sonos add-on with a Vera Lite I am trying to use the Sonos state to trigger a Z-wave switch to turn on power to the amplifiers when the Sonos is playing, and off when none of them are playing.

But I am relatively novice Vera user, which probably isn’t helping…

I can set up scenes that detect the Sonos state, and they do so if I change the state from within Vera, so the basic scene element seems OK.

The main problem I am having is getting the Sonos app to detect the change in status from Stopped to Playing, and visa versa, when I make it play using a Sonos controller or other device. Manually forcing the Sonos app to check the state with the ‘Check now’ button doesn’t result in the state being updated in the Sonos app, and I have tried to configure the Auto-check in the Sonos app to check every minute, but it still steadfastly refuses to identify the change in state from playing to stopped, or visa versa.

I would really love to get this working as an elegant way of controlling power to the amplifiers, so would appreciate the input from people who might have had more success with the Sonos app.

Thanks in advance,

Dave

2

Hi All,

An interesting update to this.

The Sonos item I am using is a Connect. Through it I use Line in for TV, and through the Sonos software I play Tune in radio, my music library and Pandora.

I have discovered that the detection of state and scenes to turn my amp on or off work perfectly with all uses EXCEPT Pandora. A change in state with any of the other inputs or music sources immediately results in the state change being detected by the Sonos app. But it refuses to sense changes with Pandora.

All my original testing was done with Pandora unfortunately.

So my problem now is Pandora - any thoughts as to why Pandora is not detected, and what can be done to address it?

Thanks,

Dave

3

Yes, Pandora is apparently not well implemented by Sonos and notifications are missing.
One solution could be in this case to uninstall the event proxy and rely on an automatic full refresh every 15 seconds. I don’t recommend this solution because you loose reactivity in updates and you add a big and regular activity to your Vera that probably increase reliad frequency.

4

Thanks lolodomo. Sound slike this is a known issue with Sonos and Pandora.

I’m not quite sure how I would go about implementing what you have suggested, but it doesn’t seem desirable.

At least now I have a viable manual solution. I start the Sonos with one of the other applications which does trigger the amp, then change over to Pandora.

I haven’t yet run the test to see if eventually the app picks up when I have stopped playing Pandora. But if it does, then it might just mean that the amps stay on for a bit longer than they should.

Thansk,

Dave