Revisit our HomeAssistant Integration

[rtertiaer]

We have a good initial rendition of a HomeAssistant integration donated by our community. We should probably revisit this integration and make it more officially supported.

This ticket is a bit of a placeholder for some of that work. Some ideas are sketched out here; other needs exist around continued testing, making it robust, etc.

[rtertiaer]

We could definitely spruce up the HomeAssistant plugin interaction with HomeKit.

[linknum23]

• Single file/uri playback uses our announcement feature, it should really allocate and use a source
• zones and groups of zones have entities but how do you use them? It is not immediately obvious
• test how to use this in LMS mode, several users have reported this is very useful
• we need to add this as a pluigin to HACS (and later HA itself). Right now the documentation says were a HACS plugin but it really needs to be manually installed
• the underlying AmpliPi client, pyamplipi, probably needs some small updates for changes in our API

[rtertiaer]

• can homeassistant do dynamic grouping of zones?

[rtertiaer]

some helpful links:

• https://github.com/brianhealey/hacs_amplipi
• https://github.com/brianhealey/pyamplipi

@mjustian will take a look at this plugin, assess how it could be improved, and start these tasks.

[linknum23]

• For better integration with amplipi we may need to maintain a fork of this with extra amplipi functionality: https://github.com/kalkih/mini-media-player
• The media player has a good readme on how to install the development version of the media player. Our plugin requires similar steps right now.

[rtertiaer]

I think it's reasonable to call this complete now, yeah?

[mjustian]

Yeah