Halloween ideas? Speaker to play sounds controlled by OH?

Setup, Configuration and Use Scripts & Rules
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My wife and I bought some Hue lights, Z-Wave motion sensors, a DoorBird with motion sensor, etc. that we plan to have some fun with for Halloween to entertain the trick-or-treaters (and ourselves). Orange, green, and purple lights, motion-triggered flashes, etc.

One component I haven’t found yet - an integrated way to play arbitrary sounds triggered by OH on a remote device. Anyone have any suggestions?

If I couldn’t find anything pre-made for a reasonable cost, I was considering writing an Android app to run on an old smartphone or something running on a Raspberry Pi that could work with an OH binding to allow creating items for the device and controlling it by triggering commands on the items. One of the items could play a registered sound, for example. Or maybe even something similar using MQTT.

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Hello Jason

Maybe Sonos could be an Option. There is a binding and you can controll them by OH.
Or a RPI with remote exec…
regards
Michael

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Sonos would be an option by using the PlayURI-channel. However I don’t think anybody would buy a "cheap " Sonos Player just for that.

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If you have a spare Pi w/ WiFi, connect a speaker.
Either install OH and use MQTT binding to link (=synchronize) those remote items to items on your central OH instance. Search the forum for MQTT.
Or simply use the exec binding on your central OH and issue a command like
ssh frontdoor-pi 'mpg123 boo.mp3'.

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My doorbell is actually wired directly to openHAB as I/O. When the trick-or-treater rings my doorbell, the front porch lights and the lights in my jack-o-lanterns turn off, so they are sitting in total darkness. I have a continuous audio loop of screaming with the speaker leads going through a normally closed contact on a relay fired by the porch lights command, So, they ring the doorbell, all lights go off and screaming comes from speakers in the bushes.

Of course, this is all in view of my front porch camera. .

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I now have OpenHAB playing creepy sounds via MQTT (using Mosquitto and mqtt-launch) on a RPi2 and speakers, along with lights dimming and changing color, when motion is detected up front and the doorbell button is pressed.

Thanks for all the ideas!

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@asjohnson9Scott Johnson @StormwindJason Spangler
How did you do that
How do the rules and ithems look like

I would love to do the same with sound
With the light I’ve already done
With sound I do not know where I should begin :slight_smile:
sorry for Google english :frowning:

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@djuscha - for sound, here is how I did it:

  1. Set up and run a MQTT broker like Mosquitto
  2. Connect OpenHAB to the MQTT broker using the MQTT binding. Decide a MQTT topic (basically a path like “playsound/frontdoor”) and post a message to it from a rule.
  3. Set up one or more Raspberry Pi devices on your network (wired Ethernet or wifi) - they are small, inexpensive single board Linux computers. Hook speakers up to them.
  4. Set up mqtt-launcher on the Raspberry Pi, connecting it to the MQTT broker from above and listening to the MQTT topic from above.
  5. Configure mqtt-launcher play a sound when a message is received - example: /usr/bin/omxplayer --no-osd -o local /opt/sounds/EvilLaughMale9.mp3
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Many thanks, now has to read a lot