Roon Extension: Athom Homey

Hi there,

Let me first introduce me. I’m an independant software developer from The Netherlands. And I like tinkering a lot, accompanied by lots of music.

Lately I developed some NodeJS app for my Athom Homey. (https://www.athom.com/). To be able to control Roon. The Homey is a real cool device. It has several radio antennas, an infrared receiver/transmitter. Basically it allows you to control everything in and around your house. It runs the latest version of NodeJs internally. So perfect match for the Roon api.

The app is currently in beta mode: https://github.com/mebrein/node-homey-roon. Of course you need to own a Homey device. The app now implements some basic functions like pausing/starting a zone. And the ability turning on some lights when Roon starts/stops. It can handle multiple zones. Once the app is accepted in the app store, it will be available to all Homey users. I’m really excited about it, although I have no clue how many Roon users actually have a Homey :wink:

Coming weeks I will keep adding more and more features to make it feature complete. Till now I had lots of fun developing this. And many thanks @Roonlabs thanks for making the api available on the NodeJS platform!!! I really enjoyed using it.

Best regards,
Merijn

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@MvM, maybe you should get this added into @Jan_Koudijs extension manager…you both are from the same neck of the woods too.

Jan how to manually add this to the existing infrastructure your setup has?

I’m not sure if there’s a use case for it since the app ‘lives’ in the Homey device. Btw, the Homey is from the same woods too :sunglasses:

Looks like you have hit a milestone (I just checked their app store…)

There is no easy way to manually add an extension. Best is to do what you did: ask the developer if he wants to include it in the extension repository. But If I understood it correctly, this extension only runs on the Athom device and this device already has a distribution channel via its own app store. @MvM, please correct me if I’m wrong.

The other way around may make more sense, i.e. have the extension manager available as an app in the Homey store in order to run other Roon extensions on the device. (Don’t know how feasible this is, just thinking out loud)

Yes, the first beta was indeed accepted very quickly. (yay :smiley:)

I guess the best place for the extension manager is on the Roon core itself. The Homey app runs on the Homey itself, as a positive side affect it will have minimal performance impact on Roon.

Some elaboration on use cases. Homey is built for home automation with no programming involved from the end-users… So the following should be feasible right out-of-the-box. Sending the title of the current song to twitter. When a specific output turns on, the Philips Hue light, or IKEA lamp next to the output also will be turned on/dimmed. And only then when it’s dark inside the room. Because Homey knows whether it is day or night. Or Homey could turn on some other devices. Homey has an infrared transmitter, which can learn the signal of other remotes. A lot of high-end devices have infrared controls… Maybe Homey can learn those and be the single remote control. You also can connect your Alexa to Homey. Currently I use it to control the volume of my LS-50.

Coming days I will add more functionality. Like the settings page, and the prev/next controls. But basic functionality (pairing), and a stable connection to Roon, is already there.

I just released version 0.2.0. Implemented some basic trivial controls: previous/next/pause/play. And a stability improvement.

@MvM Hi,

First sorry for my bad english this is not my mother language. Thanks for the app for Homey, are you going to develop the app even further?

Bump this thread, yes.
I too would like to tie at least the basic Roon controls (play/pause, forward, volume up/down) to my Homey ecosystem. I would like to include Roon playback in my automation flows and maybe use Roon playlists.
BluOS is integrated in Homey quite well, for instance. There is no listing for Roon under ‘devices’ in Homey, however. Does anybody know what the current state of Roon/Homey integration is?

I am also very interested in a Roon extension. There is an easy implementation for the Elgato Stream Deck. Something like this would be valuable.

Bump. If I wasn’t such a mediocre developer I would take up this project. Alas, after getting the Homey Pro 2023, I would really like to have some control over Roon, like I have with Sonos, Spotify or even a lot of my stereo appliances (Homey have a nice infrared control library).

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Would also be great to have this!

As an interim solution, and an excellent one with a bit of work, I installed the Roon integration into Home Assistant and then added the Roon end-points using the Home Assistant Community Homey App (the official one works too, but not as well). Once this is done, you have full media player control of Roon in Homey!

HA is pretty easy to install on a Raspberry Pi, so have used this solution for a few other integrations that don’t yet exist for Homey but are available in HA, effectively just using HA as a bridge, which has been very stable so far.