After being hooked on Sonos and installing loudspeakers everywhere, (yes, also in the washing room and the garage) I have started to think about how one can control and use the system also for other purposes than playing music and film in different zones.
Example: Let’s say you have a thermometer in your garden connected to your network and you would like your home to tell you the temperature at 8 o’clock every morning before you go to work. The sonos system would be an excellent choice to convey that message.
Tonight I took a look at what open source home automation software there are on the market. I found Openhab which “aims at providing a universal integration platform for all things around home automation”. It was fairly easy to set it up as a service on my ubuntu server and they have bindings for a lot of hardware, among them Sonos speakers. They have a decent Android application and after some configuration it is now possible to execute some simple commands like play/pause via my android phone over the internet (yes, the traffic is SSL encrypted and password protected). That is promising for the further development.
Tonight I also installed an open source Sonos client written in Java that runs fine in Ubuntu. Sonos only provides client to Windows and Mac OS but with Janos we get “full coverage” since Java runs virtually everywhere.