The Music Solution
The back patio finally has proper audio. I originally dabbled in low-end speakers to see what they could do, and as expected, not well. So, I started a hunt for a proper solution. My main concern was finding an amplifier/receiver that could stream audio from my own self hosted setup. I have my own local music collection and several years ago, I built my own song and playlist manager. I built an integration into Alexa’s music stream system so that any of the Alexa’s in the house could play music and my web interface took care of picking songs/playlists.
I ended up with an Arylic 100W Amplifier. I suspect it is overkill for the patio, but I was having a tough time figuring out the ideal power level for an outdoor patio speaker. I didn’t want to under buy, so I suspect I overbought. That said there really wasn’t a lot of middle ground options. It is paired with a Polk outdoor speaker. The resulting audio is very good. No complaints. Though, my hearing really isn’t that good.
Back to the amp, it has a bunch of features. I’ll probably only use the LinkPlay integration, which is directly supported by Home Assistant. So, volume controls, start/stop, power, ect are all controlled from my Home Assistant interface. Audio playback is a bit more involved. I use NodeRed for my animation and complex rule automation. I added a NodeRed script for the stereo that goes to my playlist manager, gets a song for the relevant device and sends the play command to the amplifier. When it gets an event saying the song is over (which actually fires a second or so before the song finishes playing), it grabs the next song and plays it. I added some script trigger buttons to Home Assistant and I can start/stop the audio streaming as needed. I’m still working on the dashboard, but the basics are functional.
This Project
I needed an electrical box to keep the amplifier safe. It will also probably be a junction box for the power to the Penguin lights. Just putting a bland plastic box up there, doesn’t work for me. For the first box, I went with a Mai Tai theme. This time, I opted to go with a cartoon theme. I found a picture of the Peanuts gang playing instruments on the back of one of the Peanuts music CDs. Using the projector, I transferred the paper to the panel door. In general, it went well. I need to get some more opaque paints for the next painting project and it took a bit to figure out the best approach for the black lines (ink pens), but it came out as expected. I’m hoping the next painting attempt looks a little better.