Anyone interested in cheap volume control knob that works with the Web extension?

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I’ve been setting up a dedicated display controller for my main Roon system. My wife’s main complaint it’s too hard for her to adjust the volume when she comes in the room while music is playing. So I put together a 12" touchscreen with a Pi4 running the Web extension. But what she really wanted was a volume knob.

So I found one of the nicer USB keyboard based volume knobs on Amazon, and hacked together some code to make it work with the Web Controller. When you turn the knob the Web apps volume slider pops up and tracks your volume changes until you stop moving the knob for a second.

I’d go ahead a publish this a new extension this weekend, but I work for a big internet software company and I have to go through legal to get approval for submitting code to the public domain. It’s largely a formality, but it will take me a couple of weeks to go through the process.

So I’d like to see how much interest there is for something like this before going to that trouble.

Cheers.

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Here’s a photo…

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I wonder if @spockfish Harry could plug an option into Ropieee for something similar for those RPi without a display too.

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Yeah I will likely be packaging it to run standalone as just a volume control extension on it’s own. So you don’t actually need a display.

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I’ve been happily using the Griffin USB Powermate rotary encoder knob and the associated extension, but that hardware has been long discontinued. Having a currently-available solution would be nice.

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Looks promising! Definitely a nice to have along with Ropieee.

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@MenloBob Any status update on when you’ll be able to share your code?

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I would definitely be interested in using this. Thanks for putting it together.

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Nice! This is exactly what my kitchen hifi (Ropieee) needs :smiley:

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I have one in a draw… Can you point me in the right direction to get this working, please?

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Any idea if the Bluetooth powermate would work with this extension?

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Any idea if the Bluetooth powermate would work with this extension?

I expect not. I have no direct knowledge, but usb and bluetooth hardware are treated differently by the underlying computer - different drivers, etc. They both tell the machine “Hey, I’m an instance of a human-input device, and I turn the volume up or down” but they do so in different ways. (edited for context)

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It depends on the configuration you have in mind. To what device do you want to connect the USB Powermate?

When using a Linux device (e.g. RPi) you can install it using the Extension Manager.

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I’ve got the paperwork in at work to get approval to publish this to github. @Jan_Koudijs what do I neec to make this installable by the package manager? Build a docker container? Is there a spec somewhere?

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Meanwhile I used a double wine bottle case as an enclosure to put the volume control and the pi4 into. It’s wife approved :wink:

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Thanks for your reply. I have a NUC Rock core, a Raspberry Pi with Ropieee and potentially a griffin usb power mate for it… looks like this hardware combination isn’t supported. It’s certainly not worth adding another pi or pc just to run the extension manager, or perhaps I’m misunderstanding something?

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MJB I think you just need to run DietPi with Roon Bridge and the extension manager instead of Rooopie.

@Jan_Koudijs are the maintainers of Roopie unwilling to integrate the extension manager?

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Does the extension manager do anything to manage startup of the extensions?

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Sure. It keeps track of the state of the extensions, meaning that running extensions are automatically restarted in case of a system reboot.