Home Assistant

How I wired Home Assistant, Music Assistant, a Raspberry Pi, and a WLED ESP32-S3 together to get audio-reactive lights driven entirely from the music stream — no microphone required. (Claude helped with both the project and this post) The Goal I wanted my WLED-controlled lights to react to whatever was playing through my HiFi system — pulsing, flashing, and shifting colours in time with the music. The catch: I didn’t want a microphone picking up room noise, and I wanted it to work automatically whenever music played, without any manual intervention. ...

In 2025 I started adding more and more things to Home Assistant, starting with my Daikin A/C and temperature/humidity sensors. One of the thing I wanted was to manage my audio system. Over the years I have tried multiple things, including using a raspberry pi with a recreated Pi Music Box implementation based on docker. I eventually settled for using said raspberry pi as a headless Spotify player connected to my Hifi. This meant that my only source of audio was Spotify, which to be fair kind of worked but limited my choices. I also had a DVD-CD player connected to my amplifier and my whole collection of CD ripped in FLAC format, but I rarely used the first option and didn’t have the second one accessible to be played. ...