Question

Motion sensors and sonos?

  • 21 August 2016
  • 7 replies
  • 2885 views

I don't have sonos but would like to use it as part of a smart home system. I'm curious if it would be possible to have sonos linked to motion sensors. Therefore as you walk theough your house the music moves with you. It turns off when you leave the room and continues in the next room or hallway you enter.

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7 replies

I theory it's possible, but you will need to develop your own software for it.

However, in practice these things rarely work well. I speak from some experience as I have had my lighting control system linked to my security system for over 15 years and this enables me to use the room sensors to control lighting programs.

I have limited motion control lighting to two rooms: my hall and my kitchen as these are the only rooms it really works in.

If you are the only person in your home, then it may work. If you are not then it is guaranteed to be problematic. As someone who lives with multiple people and pets, it wouldn't work for me.

And if you do live alone, just put the music in in every room!

Cheers,

Keith
Badge +20
I used Homeser, x10 motion sensors and a X10 RF remote to control Sonos many years ago, orginally controlled the Slim Devices Slimp3 very sucessfully but no so the Sonos. Its possible (my opinion) that Home Automation will be more integrated in the future, perhaps after voice control.
Userlevel 7
Badge +21
Insteon has a smart home hub system where you could set up a scene for a Sonos player, and when a motion detector sensed motion, it would activate that scene and the music would begin playing. As for having music follow you... it wouldn't be able to do that (it would definitely require custom software like Majik says)... but you could at least have music start playing when you walk into a room. Only limitation to Insteon + Sonos is that Insteon can only learn four Sonos zones and 10 stations to play (I've had no success with playlists in the past).

More info: www.insteon.com/sonos
Userlevel 7
Badge +22
There is a good bit of integration with Smartthings and Sonos that you could probably get something to work with it. I don't know of any external abilities to group and ungroup following you around house. But you could probably set all zones playing at 0 volume and have the volume update to a higher level the zone for sensor that activates.
Here is a different approach to the location problem. One would not want this scale of system in your home, but a small beacon that plugs into an electrical outlet could easily identify a room. In a scaled down system one could not resolve actual coordinates, but as long as there was minimal spillover into adjacent areas a simple scheme could work.
Have you seen this Kickstarter page

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1109816630/trajectio-motion-powered-hue-and-sonos-smart-home
Funding unsuccessful. Interesting idea, though.