Sep 14

Integrating Home Automation Apps

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SqueezePad 1.10.0 comes with improved Home Automation Integration.

Those of you doing home automation, typically use a different App as their main remote control App. Typical examples are CommandFusion , iRule, iRemoteControl .

These tools often allow you to start a different App with a short URL, so you are able to directly start SqueezePad from them.

Unfortunately there are some problems with this approach (well not anymore with SqueezePad):

  • your home automation tools are typically centered around rooms, so just starting a Squeezebox Controller with an arbitrarily selected room is confusing
  • at some point you want to get back to your Home Automation App. Pressing the home button of your iPad and selecting the App on the iPads main screen is inconvenient.
When you you’ve done everything right, you will be able to have the following new icon in SqueezePad:
squeezepad-return
So how does all this magic work?
Actually quite simple. As an example in CommandFusion you can configure the following:

squeezepad://?returnURL=iviewer://&defaultPlayer=00:04:20:27:91:1f

Let’s explain the different parts:
squeezepad://? the beginning of the URL tells iOS to start SqueezePad
returnURL=iviewer:// the URL to return to, when the user presses the icon in SqueezePad.  If you leave out this parameter, SonoPad won’t show the icon to return to the original App.For most other Apps (except CommandFusion and TPControl) you need to URL-encode this part ( so it would read iviewer%3A%2F%2F)
& separator, to tell iOS the next parameter starts
defaultPlayer=00:04:20:27:91:1f MAC-address of the player that should be selected by default, when SqueezePad starts.
This address MUST be configured in lowercase!To find the MAC-address of your players, enter the settings screen of your Squeezebox-Server. On the “Information” Tab all MAC addresses are listed.If you leave out this parameter, SqueezePad will revert to it’s default behaviour, i.e. on start it will select the SqueezeBox that was selected when you left SqueezePad the last time.

 

Here some other examples:

iRule squeezepad://?returnURL=irule%3A%2F%2F&defaultPlayer=00:04:20:27:91:1f
tpcontrol squeezepad://?returnURL=tpcontrol://&defaultPlayer=00:04:20:27:91:1f

Hope you enjoy this new feature! If there are any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me via support(at)squeezepad.com

Eine Antwort zu “Integrating Home Automation Apps”

  1. Alan Downs sagt:
    5. February 2014 um 18:36

    Hi,
    I’m on the RTi Forum as speedownsie.
    The function in this thread is coming to RTi App soon.
    I would like to be able to control audio of other devices through Squeezepad, but not the player itself, as different zones have different amplifiers connected. e.g multiroom amp, AVR etc… Will be controlling them through the XP processor/rs232.
    The squeezebox/vortexbox players are presented as streams to the system.
    Thanks
    Alan.