The effect of Google Chromecast is that you still need an amplifier to power the speakers. Even if they don't play music, they can consume a lot of energy. Therefore, although Chromecast allows you to subtly control music playback, you still need to use a remote control or a physical switch to turn the amplifier on and off. That's not very smart-it's not a smart home anyway.
This is the problem I encountered with the old AVR Denon AVR 1807 that used HDMI. I use it for living room lights, but whenever I want to play music, I need a remote control to turn it on. To make matters worse, I hid the amplifier somehow and asked me to lift my toes and point the remote at the correct angle. Imagine me explaining to my wife how to do this. She can never do it, and whenever I want to listen to music, I always have to do it. Guess how often we forget to turn off the power after the music stops...almost always.
One of mine
The first application of this setup is to replace the remote control with a smart plug and turn the amplifier on and off when music is played from the Chromecast or stopped. Even before I switched from Mozilla IoT Gateway to Home Assistant (another article on this will be published soon)
prerequisites:
And through which Gateway integration, you can connect the plug in the following ways (whether it is IKEA, Philips Hue,
In Home Assistant, I set up a simple automation program (YAML code at the bottom).
Give it a name and description that suits your needs. I gave me
The mode must be "restart", which is very important when you use delay to achieve,
Please turn off the amplifier after a certain period of time. Restart mode will restart the sequence of events, including a delay in waiting, in case the music starts playing again.
In the "Trigger" section, you need to place a status trigger and listen for status changes on the Chromecast entity. You don’t need to add any value to "From" or "To" because we will focus on specific states in the operation.
Finally, the interesting part is the action. Here, you need to choose between the status that the Chromecast changes to.
I used two options for the selection block:
Option 1-Music is played, and the amplifier is turned off
When the music starts playing and the amplifier is turned off, turn it on.
Option 2-Chromecast is off and the amplifier is still on
I found that this is the simplest condition for Chromecast Audio. After 20 minutes, it will automatically change from "Pause" to "Close". And setting a condition for this is very simple.
As an alternative, you can use "Pause" and add a delay time of your choice.
5 minutes before calling
service. Remember that the mode should be "restart" in case the music starts playing before the delay ends.
That's it! Now you can use a single automation function to make your old amplifier smart with Chromecast, plus Smart Plug and Home Assistant.
