Control Sonos with MoesHouse Zigbee Smart Knob
08 May 2023I picked up this neat little Zigbee knob on AliExpress to use as a volume control for Sonos. It seems pretty well made, with a strong magnet on the back to attach it to its little mounting plate (or anything else it’ll stick to) and it was easy enough to connect to Zigbee2MQTT.
Smart Home Scene has a detailed review with more photos and a tear down of the internals.
The only minor gotcha is the need to disable legacy mode for the knob in Zigbee2MQTT, which alters the MQTT payload to send action triggers.
'0x00123456789abcde':
friendly_name: 'office-smart-knob'
legacy: false
To control Sonos I’ve set up three automations in Home Assistant: rotate right / left for volume up and down, and single press to select the line in source. For the volume automations I added a condition to check that the Office Sonos is actually playing, to avoid being deafened after using it as a fidget toy when nothing is playing.
Volume Up / Down Automation
alias: Office Volume Up
trigger:
- platform: device
domain: mqtt
device_id: <knob device id>
type: action
subtype: rotate_right
discovery_id: 0x00123456789abcde action_rotate_right
condition:
- condition: device
device_id: <sonos device id>
domain: media_player
entity_id: media_player.office
type: is_playing
action:
- service: media_player.volume_up
data: {}
target:
device_id: <sonos device id>
mode: single
Source Selection Automation
alias: Office Source to Line-in
trigger:
- platform: device
domain: mqtt
device_id: <knob device id>
type: action
subtype: single
discovery_id: 0x00123456789abcde action_single
condition: []
action:
- service: media_player.select_source
data:
source: Line-in
target:
device_id: <sonos device id>
mode: single