Hi, The steep learning curve of openhab has me at something of a loss… I’m hoping someone can offer a reason, or more accurately, a cure for this issue. I’m setting up an announcement system using openhab GPIO inputs to trigger specific announcements on 3 seperate and remote piCore Player devices in different locations. I am able to set the system up to operate correctly using each picore player as both a squeezebox server and player. When I attempt to bridge multiple players to a single server I don’t seem to get a complete address for the player’s “thing” (ie:- the Mac address of the device is missing) in this configuration no sound is played but no errors are generated. If I set up each device as it’s own server, all operates as it should… Until I power 1 unit down and back up again. This action creates new squeezebox players in the inbox, and after that nothing works until I go through and delete all servers and players and build the system again in paper UI. Any suggestions to save my sanity?
Have you created a squeezebox server Thing for each of the three squeezebox servers? If each pCP is running a player AND a server, and you have three squeezebox server Things, I would expect each of the squeezebox servers to detect all three of the players. I would expect this could become quite confusing.
What do you mean by bridge? In the player Thing config, are you setting the bridge to point to a specific server Thing? If so, this would be the recommended configuration – one server Thing and 3 player Things configured with the server Thing as the bridge.
I’m not sure if this is the same issue that you’re seeing, but I’ve seen some weirdness with how the server detects players, especially after a power restore. Occasionally, my Logitech Media Server (LMS) would detect a player with a MAC address of 00:00:00:00:00:00. I think this is some type of race condition at startup concerning address assignment using DHCP. Do your pCPs get their addresses assigned statically or dynamically? If dynamically, try setting them up with static IP addresses. Ever since I changed mine to static, I’ve not had the MAC address weirdness.
That ks for the input gents… @mhilbush, the only way I ha e been able to make the system work is if each player is assigned to its own server… I realise this is not ideal, but when I try to use a si glue server the player addresses don’t contain the mac address of the player pi and no sound is produced.
I am currently using DHCP but the IP address don’t change… I’ll set fixed addresses and see what happens… I’m sure it is something that simple but it has had me puzzled for days. I’ll let you k ow the outcome.
Cheers
Greg.
Yes, that’s expected. But, what I found was that when the pCP restarts, it still requests the DHCP lease. And I think there is some sort of timing issue when it does that. Let’s see what happens with static addresses.
Can you post a pic of what it looks like in PaperUI? Take a snip of the properties and the first channel. Like this.
Well, seems that’s not as easy as expected… no option for static IP on wifi and I’m using pi-zero-w devices. We’ll get there in the end… When I checked the properties of the non-working players there is no name or IP shown. So it’s no surprise they don’t play audio. Before going too much further I’ll need to find some way to apply Static IP’s so I can eliminate that which seems to be the most likely cause. I’ve also attached snips of the server and player edit pages showing the bridge, IP, and Mac info is present.
OK… I think I finally have a solution… The good news is it’s not an issue with DHCP so I don’t have to find a way to set up static IP’s for WiFi in a system that’s not designed to work that way. The fix (probably really obvious to those with more linux experience) disable the LMS start on boot on all but 1 of my picore player devices! As soon as I did this and created the LMS server in openhab, all players appeared in the inbox, adding the players produced correct and complete addressing info for each, browsing to the IP of any of the players showed all 3 players as tabs across the top of the page, and browsing to the server’s port 9000 web interface showed all players in a single list. Better still, I can power off any / all devices and the whole system comes back to life and just works like I had expected it to… Thanks for the assist… I believe I’ve learned a lot!.. Next challenge, GPIO outputs on another remote Pi!
Glad you got it sorted out. 
Sorry for sending you down the DHCP rat hole.
All good man… You pointed me in the right direction and gave me options that led to a good outcome! I’d probably still be scratching my head otherwise!