players, as well as a Mycroft instance I can ask music requests and basic playback commands. All good so far...
Oooh, what's "Mycroft"?
Sorry that should have read Mycroft "assistant", it's an open source "AI" designed to compete with Alexa and Google's Home. It's of course nowhere near the capabilities of the two giants, but it's growing a fair bit and the skills are easy to install or write. Homeassistant and openHAB are both available as skills too. I'm simply using a RP3 with a playstation eye for the microphone array. Very cheap and works very well even across the room.
I'd love to have something physical like a remote control
What an interesting thought. You could always buy some Duo controllers, although I suspect they'd be more expensive than a Pi/Arduino solution. Here's an (expensive) example. They come up cheaper than this;
A remote like that would be pretty good, but yes, I can't justify spending so much as ideally there'd be a controller per room. A pot attached to the walls would look neat and I'd avoid hunting around for the remotes each time I misplace them... Maybe a cheap midi fader or pot controller could be adapted to transmit its 127 values over wifi and then scaled to match the player's volume? I've yet to find a small/cheap enough unit though. Hacking any smart light units would be even more expensive I should think
One other thing I want to explore is movement sensors to bring up and down the volume as I move from one room to the next, but that's not so much of a priority...
(All of mine are plugged into amplifiers of some kind, so I can use the volume controls on those...)
yeah, the problem is most of these pi's amplifiers are hidden or rather difficult to reach (for example one in the loft feeds the mounted speakers in the bathroom, so nothing electrical but the passive speakers is actually in the bathroom). I have these amps either on or off and always set to an ideal volume, and use the LMS software to control the volume via the server. I just miss having something easy to reach and tactile that doesn't involve a screen etc..
John