from Hacker News

How-to normalize home volume levels with Node-RED

by niemyjski on 5/29/20, 1:46 PM with 28 comments

• by godot on 5/29/20, 3:55 PM

  I know this article is about Alexa/Echo, but I wish a feature like this is built into TVs :)

  I have a young kid now and she's in bed by 8:30. I'd like to watch TV in the living room in the evening after her bed time. I want to watch a movie like say, Avengers. I want to listen to the dialogue instead of/in addition to reading subtitles. The problem is in most movies, you have low volume dialogues, and then there's explosions and stuff with high volume (intended effect; which is nice at the theater, but not nice with a kid sleeping in the next room). I don't want to wear headphones. So I end up with a remote in hand, keep adjusting the volume high or low on reaction as quickly as my reflex allows me to.

• by RNCTX on 5/29/20, 5:27 PM

  It baffles me that more people have not found and found uses for Node Red. It's one of the coolest utilities that I've stumbled across in the past 5 years.

  In a sane world there would be no more Zapiers and IFTTT because of it, at the very least.

• by rcarmo on 5/29/20, 6:34 PM

  I've been using Node-RED for a few years now, and I can automate my LG TV's volume (handy for when the kids punch it up for cartoons) and control it via Siri (which is wired into Node-RED).

  One of the medium-complexity things I do with it is check the iOS App Store prices for apps I'm interested to get notifications when they're discounted, but all my home automation runs on it, and this post has links to most of the series:

  https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2019/01/13/1900

  I also maintain my own Node-RED docker images for ARM and Intel:

  https://github.com/insightfulsystems/node-red

• by SparkyMcUnicorn on 5/29/20, 3:54 PM

  I've been doing a lot with Home Assistant lately, and lots of things that play nicely like node-red.

  Does anyone have a set up to manage music service playback to media players like Google Home (or I guess it's Nest now) speakers?

  It would be fantastic to start playing music via Spotify from the dashboard, or based on events and node-red flows. Not sure if the new forked-daapd integration will help me out here, but last time I tried to work with MPD specifically (unrelated project) I ran into walls left and right trying to get something working.

• by tunesmith on 5/29/20, 5:59 PM

  And then you have devices like the seemingly-cool Sonos One, that has two different internal volume levels, one for Alexa, and one for the music, and they're wildly different. And there doesn't appear to be any way to normalize them. Maybe you could use this to hack it by adjusting volume levels immediately before and after any music is played.

• by andrepd on 5/29/20, 6:36 PM

  I don't get the fixation on wiretapping one's home for marginal convenience gains.