RE: Bathroom audio advice needed/recommendation

["Paul Gordon" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's a bit of a convoluted route, but it's been very fast & very
reliable so far...

In a nutshell, there *has* to be a PC involved, since the SONOS uses
UPnP as its control protocol. Windows XP can talk UPnP, and so can
Windows server 2003 with a little effort..

The PC is connected to comfort directly via a UCM (serial in my case,
but I suppose it could just as easily be an Ethernet variety). The PC
runs Homeseer, and the Homeseer-Comfort plugin. Thus *everything* that
happens in Comfort is reported to the Homeseer PC. Comfort is connected
to the CBUS network directly via UCM-CBUS, thus every CBUS group change
(i.e a switch press) is reflected in Comfort as a counter change, which
is then duly reported to Homeseer.

So the event goes: CBUS button press -> causes comfort counter change
->
is reported to Homeseer..

Homeseer also has the SONOS plugin installed, meaning that Homeseer can
both control and monitor the SONOS zones, and can run events to issue
commands to SONOS. Those events can have a trigger associated with them:
yup, the trigger is a comfort counter change...

So when the: CBUS button press -> causes a comfort counter change ->
which is reported to Homeseer, then: -> Homeseer triggers an event ->
which via the SONOS plugin -> sends the UPnP command to the
zoneplayer...

Although it sounds long-winded, it happens very quickly... - in fact, I
have a CBUS switch in the bathroom which is an "all off", - as
well as
sending a PAUSE command to the zoneplayer, it also turns off the
bathroom CBUS lights.. When pressed, the music stops faster than the
filaments in the lightbulbs go fully dark... (So in about 1/10th of a
second!)

You do of course need to have the requisite hardware parts to bridge the
physical networks, although I imagine that Homeseer could probably be
replaced with A.N.OTHER software, provided it can listen to & decipher
the datastream coming out of Comfort, & issue UPnP commands onto the
LAN
in response. It just so happens that I was already running Homeseer, and
conveniently, the necessary plugins to bridge both protocols already
existed...

HTH

Oh, and in case you're wondering, in the 8 or so months since I set up
the bathroom button, I haven't had ONE SINGLE failure of the command to
get through. - The ONLY time it "stops working" is if the
bathroom zone
is linked to another zone (i.e. the other zone is the "master" of
the
group) - in which case the linked zones do not respond to (most)
commands sent directly to them, the commands have to be sent to the
master zone instead. - That, however, is a "feature" of the way
SONOS
works, and not a failure as such. If I get time to look at it in the
future, I think, based on what I have researched so far, that it should
be fairly easy to code around this, and detect if the zone is linked to
another, and send a command to drop it from the group... then my all off
button would work in all circumstances.


Paul G.


-----Original Message-----
From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Robert Jennings
Sent: 07 February 2008 14:33
To: UKHA Group
Subject: Re: [ukha_d] Bathroom audio advice needed/recommendation

Paul,

How do you control your Sonos from Cbus & Comfort ?

Robert
On 20 Jan 2008, at 09:09, Paul Gordon wrote:
> Either way, I'd suggest you look long & hard at SONOS - it
> absolutely is the proverbial piece of p*ss to both install and use.
> It ticks all the integration boxes - I control mine from CBUS
> switches, Comfort responses, and from HomeSeer. A skinnable web
> interface is freely available, In addition to the "full fat"
PC
> interface