/SonosRemote

Turn your old Apple remote to a Sonos remote

Primary LanguageShellMIT LicenseMIT

Sonos Remote

While Sonos is a great solution for wireless speaker it sometimes lacks the support of a remote control. For easy tasks as play/pause, volume up/down, next/previous song it is easier to press a button on a remote than fiddling on your phone.

With just a Raspberry Pi and an old apple remote (or any other remote) this is quite easy to achieve.

Pi with Remote

Setup

Components used:

  • Raspberry Pi
  • IR Receiver Sensor - TSOP38238
  • Apple Remote A1156

Hardware

Connect your Sensor to 3.3V, GND and GPIO 18. Please refer to the excellent Adafruit Tutorial to see an illustration.

If you are using another remote check the list and edit lircd.conf and lircrc accordingly.

Automatic Install on Raspbian Jessie

The install script install.sh is a convenient way for automatic install of all required software and configuration of the system. For detailed instructions refer to the next section.

  • Clone this repository on your Raspberry Pi running Raspbian Jessie
git clone https://github.com/prebm/SonosRemote.git
  • Execute install.sh with root privileges
sudo ./install.sh
  • When prompted enter the desired Sonos zone the remote will work for.
  • Reboot your Raspberry Pi and have fun!

Manual Install with Instructions for older Raspbians

The following section describes how to install the IR Receiver Sensor and the required software to your Raspberry Pi. At the end, there is a part with instructions how to enable the daemon for automatic start at boot for older versions of Raspbian with init.d and newer versions (starting with Jessie) with systemd.

Please refer to the link section at the end of this Readme. It contains useful links for troubleshooting.

  • Install GIT:
sudo apt-get install git
  • Install PIP:
sudo apt-get install python-pip

sudo apt-get install lirc

sudo apt-get install python-lirc

sudo pip install soco
  • Clone this repository. Note: at the moment there are some paths hardcoded to the install path /home/pi/SonosRemote/. If you choose another path to your files, be sure to change the paths respectively.
git clone https://github.com/prebm/SonosRemote.git

I am running Raspbian 8.0 with the Kernel 4.4, for Kernels before 3.18 one step is different

  • Depending on your Kernel (uname -a):
    • ≥ 3.18: Edit /boot/config.txt and uncomment the line
     dtoverlay=lirc-rpi
    • pre 3.18: Add following lines to /etc/modules:
    lirc_dev
lirc_rpi
  • Change the following lines in /etc/lirc/hardware.conf
LIRCD_ARGS="--uinput"
DRIVER="default"
DEVICE="/dev/lirc0"
MODULES="lirc_rpi"
  • Copy lircd.conf to /etc/lirc/ - or search your remote from the list
  • Copy lircrc to /etc/lirc/ - edit accordingly if you are using another remote
  • Reboot sudo reboot
  • Get the IP for the Sonos you want to control and put it in config.py:
$ get_sonos_ip.py
Player: Kitchen at IP: <SoCo object at ip 192.168.1.46>
  • Make sure sore.py is executable
sudo chmod +x sore.py
  • For Raspbian Wheezy and before
    • Copy sore to /etc/init.d and edit the paths if necessary
    • Make /etc/init.d/sore executable
    sudo chmod +x sore
    • and register the init script to start at boot with
    sudo update-rc.d sore defaults
  • For Raspbian Jessie and later
    • Copy sore.service to /etc/systemd/system/ and edit the paths if necessary
     sudo cp sore.service /etc/systemd/system/
    • Make sure /etc/systemd/system/sore.service has the required rights
    sudo chmod 664 sore.service
    • reload systemd daemon and enable the service
    sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable sore.service
  • Reboot your Raspberry Pi and have fun!

Running

We installed a service to run at boot. So after booting your Raspberry Pi everything should work out of the box. You can use the following commands:

  • For Raspbian Jessie
sudo systemctl status sore.service
sudo systemctl start sore.service
sudo systemctl stop sore.service
  • For Raspbian Wheezy
sudo /etc/init.d/sore start
sudo /etc/init.d/sore stop
sudo /etc/init.d/sore restart
sudo /etc/init.d/sore status

Troubleshooting

I have added a basic logging mechanism which logs to sore.log. To save disk space it is deactivated. Activate it and check the logs for any useful messages by uncommenting the following line in sore.py

# logging.basicConfig(filename="/home/pi/SonosRemote/sore.log", level=logging.INFO)

If the service is not starting up at boot, try to restart it manually. It is a known issue that the startup at boot is not working if you are running Jessie.

Links

LIRC

Sonos

Service