Messages

1

"Open air" and "whole home" microphones / THe New Amazon Echo as VoxCommando Mic

« on: November 08, 2014, 02:42:31 AM »

Amazon introduced a new product yesterday called Amazon Echo http://www.cnet.com/products/amazon-echo/ . It's essentially a cloud based service speaker using Voice Command to control it. And of course everything is geared to buying more stuff from Amazon. The interesting thing I see is the 360 deg, 7 microphone capability. It uses beam forming technology to discriminate the direction of voice in a noisy room. Something to look at for VoxCommando application.

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Vera Home Automation Controller / Re: Can VC Announcements be Forwarded to SONOS

« on: October 08, 2014, 10:17:27 PM »

A Follow-up:

There is a difference in the outcome of the crawfold and nime5ter methods presented here. Using the crawfold method, if you are playing a song thru Sonos it will be muted or paused by the VC generated announcement but will resume when the announcement is over. nime5ter's method stops the song that is currently playing and that song does not continue when the announcement is over.

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Vera Home Automation Controller / Re: Can VC Announcements be Forwarded to SONOS

« on: October 08, 2014, 06:18:22 PM »

Success!!

I used the procedure developed by crawfold. I had already completed step 1 and 2. I was already using the Sonos plugin developed for use with Vera to control the music traffic in my home. Step 3 which is the Scene development worked like a charm. Every step completed exactly as written without any issues.

AND...

I also changed the code that was provided by nime5ter and and used nime5ter's suggestion to change ""SetURItoPlay" (which only loads the file)to "PlayURI" in order to play a media file. That was why I thought the file wasn't making it's way to the Sonos. It was...it just wasn't being played.

So, there are two methods developed out of this effort that offer a way to send VC tts announcements to Vera/Sonos.

I'm done. Thank you, thank you.

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Vera Home Automation Controller / Re: Can VC Announcements be Forwarded to SONOS

« on: October 08, 2014, 04:31:49 PM »

Really, everyone...I appreciate the help. jitterjames, nime5ter and crawfold have given much more time and effort to this than I could have hoped for.

I will read thru the last few posts and try these things out tonight.

jitterjames was confused by what I said "I did all of these steps and I was able to get Sonos to play both mp3 and wav files from a folder on my PC. I got the proper path from my Sonos PC controller and used that path in the command string from VC. Good news, I'm not getting the access denied error but still no playing of the file thru Sonos."

nime5ter had suggested that I make sure I had the correct path. So all I did was put the tts.wav file in the folder that I use for my Sonos music library on my PC.  I then used the Sonos controller installed on my PC to listen to that tts.wav file. This proved that Sonos can play a wave and it also exposed the proper path. That effort solved the access denied error I was getting but still did not allow the tts.wav file to be played initiated from VC control. 

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Vera Home Automation Controller / Re: Can VC Announcements be Forwarded to SONOS

« on: October 08, 2014, 01:09:43 AM »

Here is the corresponding error I get from the Vera 3 log after it receives the requests from VC.

Thanks for whatever help you can offer in my troubleshooting.

6

Vera Home Automation Controller / Re: Can VC Announcements be Forwarded to SONOS

« on: October 08, 2014, 12:57:31 AM »

@nime5ter

Could you tell me why I'm getting this "ERROR: Invalid service/action/device". I'm using the code you gave me a few days ago and didn't ever see this before and my Vera 3 is behaving badly. Everything reads exactly the way you gave it.

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Vera Home Automation Controller / Re: Can VC Announcements be Forwarded to SONOS

« on: October 07, 2014, 06:36:19 PM »

Oh, I see crawfold may have a solution. I'll wait for that.

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Vera Home Automation Controller / Re: Can VC Announcements be Forwarded to SONOS

« on: October 07, 2014, 06:13:44 PM »

Quote from nime5ter

Maybe try to instruct Sonos to play a file that it already knows how to play (i.e. a music file from a folder it already accesses) to make sure you're getting the path syntax correct. That is, in your VC command, try to get it to play that file.

If that works, then try copying the TTS wav to the same folder on the music server (or wherever it is) and see if it will play the wav in that location.

If that works, then either get VC to save your TTS to that location when it's being generated, or try to figure out the difference access-wise between the original path and the path that works. Maybe Sonos can only play files from paths that have already been registered with it as valid sources, or something along those lines.

I did all of these steps and I was able to get Sonos to play both mp3 and wav files from a folder on my PC. I got the proper path from my Sonos PC controller and used that path in the command string from VC. Good news, I'm not getting the access denied error but still no playing of the file thru Sonos.  Is there a log file I can review that might help me do a trace? Obviously inching closer to a solution but I'll experiment some more.

9

Vera Home Automation Controller / Re: Can VC Announcements be Forwarded to SONOS

« on: October 06, 2014, 04:01:45 AM »

Well, I worked a fair amount over the weekend using the code provided from nime5ter . But alas, no joy... I believe the code you provided is working. The tts.wav file is generated and I get a response from SONOS. What ever is playing stops and tts.wav is queued up but I get an Access Denied error. I took a stroll over to the SONOS forums and there are lots of Access Denied discussions and tried everything I could find. Changing file permissions, adjusting the firewall, taking down the firewall....nothing. So anyone have any additional suggestions.

By the way it turns out that SONOS has issues with .wav files, they aren't recommended. So I created an .mp3 but the same issues.

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Vera Home Automation Controller / Re: Can VC Announcements be Forwarded to SONOS

« on: October 03, 2014, 04:14:47 PM »

The Play 1 can connect through home wifi or Ethernet.

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Vera Home Automation Controller / Re: Can VC Announcements be Forwarded to SONOS

« on: October 03, 2014, 11:35:37 AM »

@nime5ter, I do use the Sonos plugin. This weekend I will start with the code you provided and tinker some and see what I can come up with. I will report out my findings.

12

Vera Home Automation Controller / Re: Can VC Announcements be Forwarded to SONOS

« on: October 03, 2014, 11:32:01 AM »

A bridge is no longer required if you have a simple audio set up. I have two Play 1's.

13

Vera Home Automation Controller / Can VC Announcements be Forwarded to SONOS

« on: October 03, 2014, 02:14:42 AM »

Hello again. I have been controlling my Vera 3 using my PC, iMac and various mobile devices. The announcements at home are via a constellation of SONOS and my computer speakers. Now that I have discovered VC with the Vera plugin I would love to be able to send the announcements created by VC to my SONOS networked speakers. I have done my due diligence and searched here on this forum, at Micasaverde and generally across the internet, yet nothing of interest has caught my attention. Can anyone point me in the right direction or is this a reach too far what I am considering? I'm using VC 2.103.

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Vera Home Automation Controller / Re: Using VoxCommando with Window Coverings

« on: October 03, 2014, 02:00:51 AM »

I continued to play with Vera.WinCovAction with arguments Up, Down, Stop.  The final verdict is this command actually DOES work. The problem is the Down argument actually RAISES the curtain and the Up argument LOWERS the shade. It appears to be reversed action.

So I'm done with this. Thanks for this great plugin and I hope to contribute when I can.

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Vera Home Automation Controller / Re: Using VoxCommando with Window Coverings

« on: October 02, 2014, 08:53:10 PM »

Continued to do some experiments with the roller shades. The Vera.Dim command works but also but it will not raise and lower the shades to a proportional opening of 0-100%. It still recognizes the 0 as closed and any other numbe3r as full open. I went back to Vera.WinCovAction where the arguments are Up, Down, Stop. Up and Down doesn't work the way I am trying to use it (which is why I am here in the first place) but Stop does work.  So I now have the full control of up down stop but using two commands.

By the way these are Somfy Roller shade motors that I am controlling through their ZRTSI (Z wave to RTSI) interface.