HomeBridge on a Raspberry Pi

We’ve got Alexa running at home to control our Sonos devices. Alexa, play Metallica. Alexa, play VRT Studio Brussels. Alexa, lower the volume. Alexa, stop the music.. Once you’re used to controlling music by voice, anything else feels antiquated and clumsy.

Before Alexa, I had already installed HomeBridge on my Mac mini to integrate Sonos into HomeKit. Nothing fancy, it just enabled Play/Pause via the homebridge-sonos plugin. This allowed us to say Hey Siri, Stop Music in the Dining Room. Or, combined with a Hue Tap next to our front door, enabled me to tap one button when exiting the house and having all lights and music turn off with a single action. 

But Homebridge on my Mac mini wasn’t the most stable of installations. Updating the Mac often resulted in a broken node.js or npm installation. A recent series of tweets from Federico Vittico about installing Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi made me remember I had one somewhere in the house.

So, an afternoon later I now have a Raspberry Pi running HomeBridge with the Sonos plugin active.

Links

• If you need a good guide: HomeBridge on a Raspberry Pi.
• I followed the init.d guide to autostart homebridge upon booting the Raspberry).
• If you need a Raspberry, I recommend this Starter Kit.