Funny I was doing a bunch of research for something that would accomplish this and bought a Home Assistant Voice preview edition which also had an AUX out for music assistant and works great plus allows for voice control.
I’d be interested to know how it does Spotify streaming, I used to run a Spotify Connect integration on Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi but it was really flaky
Does it support external services on the device? I expected it to be through Music-Assistant integration.
Very nice. I have some ancient Chrome cast audio dongles that I don’t think I could even set up any more. Google has kind of abandoned them. They were really nice for what they were. Now I have a good candidate to replace them all.
Chromecast Audio was such a cool thing that they just killed for no reason whatsoever. Chromecast was a thing, you could cast music, there was no deprecation needed.
It’s been years but I have one of these home assistant ones (A different model) and it’s just like the Chromecast Audio was.
They killed them because Sonos sued them.
Edit: Or do you mean the updates that basically bricked them so Google didn’t have to continue providing the infrastructure for them?
I didn’t know that it was sonos, but I’m not surprised either. They think they invented and own multi room audio
Yeah. There was a lawsuit going on between the two companies because I guess they collaborated on some tech (where each company contributed) and there was a dispute about who stole what from whom. That was the point where a lot of Google’s smart home stuff started to enshittify too.
My personal theory about why they killed it off is because you could only get an audio ad and not a video ad on them, lol.
Even more so, the Chromecast series could not display ads on their own to my knowledge. I don’t even think their hardware was made to support it. They were literally audio/video stream parrots directly from a web stream. The ads were only delivered if the source had ads.
I have to hand it to google in this one very specific instance - chromecast audio still works.
When the certificates expired or something like that, there was a fix within a week.
I would never trust a new google product but they have continued to support this one for whatever reason.
Yes, my fear at the moment thoug. Is that at some point in the future I will have a need to move or reconfigure it. I recently had a cheap little projector that I wanted to use a modern Chromecast TV with. But being a basic cheap thing that I got for fifty dollars, it only supported 720p and probably missing HDMI DRM. Chromecast TV just refused outright.
I went and pulled a first gen Chromecast out of a drawer. Reset and tried to reconfigure it. No matter what device I tried with. Both initializing it or display output seemed to want to work.
Z-wave…is there a zigbee equivalent?
Both Z-Wave and Zigbee work by plugging the respective adapters into the AUX-2 USB port. The product page says that the Zigbee adapter works with ZHA (not Zigbee2MQTT), but hasn’t been extensively tested yet.
My understanding is it’s PoE or Wifi.
The Z-Wave ref was just an example of things to plug into it:
With the Samsung smart things change, this will save me £5 a month to control me tv
No Thread support is kind of weird.
The product announcement explains that they’re essentially doing USB-over-IP to support the Z-Wave adapter, but they can’t get Thread to work that way. The timing isn’t precise enough, or somesuch. They will need to write new firmware to turn the AUX-2 itself into a Thread router to make it work.
That can be added later.
You can do the same with a respeaker lite for half the coat
… half the coat
Like a sleeveless jacket?
nah, that’s gotta be like ⅔ to ¾ the coat.
I looked that up - I get they’re both adaptable, but is that not just a smart speaker replacement board? As opposed to this which seems more focused on music streaming with existing hardware?
It has an auxiliary out port. You can plug it into whatever you want. Optionally it can also drive a 5 watt speaker.
Coat of few Colours?
Jeff Geerling just posted about this.
