Automating white noise with Home Assistant

                                                       

So I have a 12 hour white noise clip I pulled from somewhere some long time ago that I have loaded into my Plex media server. I usually open Plex on my phone and cast it to my Bedtime google group every night but that gets tedious and tiresome after a while. Why not automate it to auto load at 8PM every night? 

If you already have Home Assistant already configured and setup then cool! If not refer to here: Installation Guide. I installed on a Pi 3B+ with 32 gig SD card.


First off, upload the mp3 file to your google drive and make it shareable to all. Follow the steps to get a  an API key and generate a direct google drive link. You will need this if you audio file is large than 100MB as google natively pops up with a display that says too large to scan and thus you cant stream it.
Follow the guide here for more info to get the direct link: https://www.wonderplugin.com/online-tools/google-drive-direct-link-generator/

Once you have this URL go to your Home Assistant portal. Scroll to Configuration --> Automations.

Create a new automation and hit the skip at the bottom as we will be configuring everything manually.
Enter a name, set your trigger to be Time and then input your time in the format of H:MM so 8 PM would be 8:00. I am not doing any conditions at this time so I skipped conditions.

On Actions you select the type to be Call Service. On the second drop down for service select media_player.play_media and then the third drop down to be your smart device you want to cast to. I selected my cast group named media_player.bedtime. Under service data there is an area to input some code Copy the following replacing YOUR URL HERE with the URL to your direct G drive or other hosted linked file. Mind you, you must include the indentation before the URL.


entity_id: media_player.bedtime
media_content_id: >-
 YOU URL HERE
media_content_type: audio/mp4

Hit the save button and to test it, scroll up and hit execute. Feel free to drop a comment below or jump on the forums at Home Assistant if you need more help.

For more info on the media.player Service look here: Media_Player


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