Home Theater API

Taking advantage of a Black Friday sale, I upgraded my living room home theater with a new Onkyo receiver. I purchased my previous receiver, also an Onkyo, in grad school and it has served me well. It was lacking in some modern features, being connected entirely analog and required speaker wire pass-through to drive the subwoofer that was added to the setup a couple of years ago. The new unit features several HDMI inputs, HDMI-ARC output, and networked services like Spotify and Chromecast. Connected via wifi there is a phone app that can control most features.

Many such consumer devices rely on purely cloud based services so it was great to discover the API allows control over the local network. I'm only just starting to explore. There is a great Python module for accessing the API including device discovery, onkyo-eiscp. An MQTT bridge, onkyo2mqtt, is promising, able to transmit messages upon device actions like volume adjustment. The former also offers a straightforward command line tool:

onkyo --host x.x.x.x audio-muting=on

Discovering this ability to adjust audio remotely, it was nice to find pychromecast allows some measure of control over the diminutive media players. Apparently the Chrome dev tools can help determine app specific commands.