ESPHome Home Theater Controller with Sony S-Link support

This is an ESPHome controller I made to fully control my home theater setup from Home Assistant. This controller includes the following input/outputs that suit my needs, but it can be easily modified for different setups.

• Sony S-Link Input/Output - Used to control a Sony CDP-CX225 CD Player
• IR Input - Used to detect ON/OFF and Volume commands from a Roku remote
• IR Output - Used to control a Yamaha RX-V2700 receiver and a daisy chained IR blaster
• ON/OFF Output (5v) - Used to control a power conditioner (completly turn off the power to the whole setup)
• 12v ON/OFF Input - Used to detect the ON/OFF status of the Yamaha RX-V2700 receiver
• 5v ON/OFF Input- Used to detect the ON/OFF status of the TV (connected to a USB port of the TV)

Sony S-Link

An Arduino Pro Mini is used as interface for the Sony S-Link Bus. The Arduino is interfaced with the ESP8622 via a serial connection. The Arduino sketch (in the Arduino Sketch folder) is entirely based on the great work from robho. The only change is that the modified code allows the option of communicating over serial using raw Hex bytes. This is achieved by defining the 'HexOutput' option at the beginning of the code (if this is not defined the code behaves as the original code).

I'm successfully using this setup to control and read information from a Sony CDP-CX225 CD Player. The ESPHome yaml file with the configuration for this device is available in the ESPHome folder.

Hardware

To physically connect the ESP8266, the Arduino, the Sony device to be controlled via the S-Link bus and the other devices (e.g. IR blaster, Power Conditioner etc.) some additional components are needed. See schematic below.

The S-Link bus operates at a 5v logic level, while the ESP8266 operates at a 3.3v logic level. There are Arduino boards that operate either at 3.3v or at 5v, therefore the circuit will depend on the type of Arduino board used. The schematics above uses an the 3.3v version of the Arduino Pro Mini, therefore the Arduino can be connected directly to the ESP8266 but R2 and R3 are needed as voltage divider on the S-Link bus line. If an Arduino that operates at 5v logic level is used instead (e.g. Arduino Nano) then R2 and R3 won't be needed but a logic level shiftier will instead be needed between the Arduino and the ESP8266.

For the Sony S-Link interface a 3.5 mm mono plug shall be used to connect the circuit to the S-Link/Control A1 port of the Sony device. A 3.5 mm mono plug would be used also to connect to most IR blasters and IR input ports on receivers, the signal goes on the mono plug tip and the ground on the sleeve.

Home Assistant interface

Entities

The ESPHome device exposes the following entities:

• switch.living_room_av_power_conditioner_switch Switch to control the ON/OFF Output (5v)
• binary_sensor.living_room_av_yamaha_receiver_status Binary Sensor for the 12v ON/OFF Input
• binary_sensor.living_room_av_tv_status Binary Sensor for the 5v ON/OFF Input
• button.living_room_av_reboot Button to reboot the ESP8266
• button.living_room_av_arduino_reset Button to reboot the Arduino

The ESPHome device also exposes the following services that can called from Home Assistant:

• esphome.living_room_av_remote_nec Used to send an IR commands using the NEC protocol. Two parameters are to be provided when calling the service address and command.
• esphome.living_room_av_remote_pioneer Used to send an IR commands using the Pioneer protocol. One parameter is to be provided when calling the service rc_code_1.
• esphome.living_room_av_cdp09 Used to send commands on the the S-Link bus. One parameter is to be provided when calling the service command. The device code is coded to 0x90 in the file in the file provided in the 'ESPHome', this can be adjsuted or additional services can be added to control multiple S-Link devices. See the links at the bottom of the page for the known S-Link commands.

For each device on the S-Link bus specific sensors will then need to be defined in the ESPHome yaml configuration file. This is done using the ESPHome UARTX custom component to process the data received from the Arduino over UART and expose it to Home Assistant as entities. The ESPHome configuration file in the 'ESPHome' folder includes the configuration for a CDP-CX225 CD Player, but can be easily adjusted for other Sony devices (see the links at the bottom of the page for the expected responses from S-Link devices).

Setup for Sony CDP-CX225

The following template sensors are to be defined in the Home Assistant configuration.yaml:

• cdp_album => This will reflect the title of the CD loaded.
• cdp_artist => This will reflect the artist of the track playing
• cdp_track_title => This will reflect the title of the track playing
• cdp_bar => This will reflect the current position in the track been played as percentage of the track duration.

template:
  - sensor:
      - name: "CD Album"
        unique_id: cdp_album
        state: |
          {% from "cdp_cd_list.jinja" import cdp_cd_list %}
          {{ cdp_cd_list.cd[(states("sensor.living_room_av_cd_playing")|int)-1].Album}}
  - sensor:
      - name: "CD Artist"
        unique_id: cdp_artist
        state: |
          {% from "cdp_cd_list.jinja" import cdp_cd_list %}
          {{ cdp_cd_list.cd[(states("sensor.living_room_av_cd_playing")|int)-1].Artist}}
  - sensor:
      - name: "CD Track Title"
        unique_id: cdp_track_title
        state: |
          {% from "cdp_cd_list.jinja" import cdp_cd_list %}
          {{ cdp_cd_list.cd[(states("sensor.living_room_av_cd_playing")|int)-1].Tracks[(states("sensor.living_room_av_playing_track")|int)-1]}}
  - number:
      - name: "CDP Track bar"
        unique_id: cdp_bar
        state: '{{ ((states("sensor.living_room_av_track_positon_s")|int) / (states("sensor.living_room_av_track_length_s")|int) * 100)|int}}'
        step: 1
        set_value: 
          - service: script.av_cdp_jumptime
            data:
              jump_to: "{{ value }}"

In addtion, the following Helpers need to be created in Home Assistant:

• input_select.cdp_cd_list This is used to provide a drop down list to pick the CD to be played
• input_select.cdp_cd_tracks This is used to provide a drop down list to pick the track to be played

The details of the CDs loaded in the CDP-CX225 are defined in the cdp_cd_list.jinja file. For each CD this file details the Artist, the Album Name, the Number of Tracks and the Title of each track. An example of this file is provided in the Home Assistant folder. This file needs to be placed in the Home Assistant custom_templates sub-folder.

The following Scripts and Automatons are provided in the Home Assistant folder:

• AV_CDP_Refresh_Album-Track.yaml Automation triggered each time the track played changes to update input_select.cdp_cd_list and input_select.cdp_cd_tracks to reflect the CD and track currently been played.
• AV_CDP_Power_Toggle.yaml Script to toggle ON and OFF the power to the CDP-CX225
• AV_CDP_JumpTime.yaml Script to jump to a specific time of the current track
• AV_CDP_Play_Disc-Track.yaml Script to play a specific CD and Track
• AV_CDP_Update_CD_List.yaml Script to load an updated content from the cdp_cd_list.jinja file (this needs to be run each time Home Assistant is re-started)

Card for Sony CDP-CX225

To control the CDP-CX225 I created a "custom card" based on Conditional Media Player Card from CollotsSpot.

This card requires the following customs cards to be installed via HACS:

• Button Card
• My Cards Bundle
• Decluttering Card

The content of decluttering_template.yaml from the Home Assistant folder needs to be pasted at top of your dashboard yaml file (Edit Dashboard > Three dot menu > raw configuration editor). A manual card then needs to be added to the dashboard with the following content (entities and colors can be edited as needed).

      - type: custom:decluttering-card
        template: cd_player
        variables:
          - service_call: esphome.living_room_av_cdp09
          - power_toggle: script.av_cdp_power_toggle
          - play_disk_track: script.av_cdp_play_disc_track
          - cd_status: sensor.living_room_av_cd_status
          - cd_playing: sensor.living_room_av_cd_playing
          - track_playing: sensor.living_room_av_playing_track
          - cd_power_status: binary_sensor.living_room_av_cd_power_status
          - cd_track_position: sensor.living_room_av_track_positon_s
          - cd_track_length: sensor.living_room_av_track_length_s
          - cd_list: input_select.cdp_cd_list
          - track_list: input_select.cdp_cd_tracks
          - primary-color: '#6F8081'
          - secondary-color: rgba(96,114,116,0.6)
          - button-background-color: rgba(96,114,116,0.2)

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Additional resources

The S-Link_CDP-CX225.xlxs file in the 'SLink Supported Commands' folder lists the commands I have found work with the CDP-CX225.

S-Link reference documents:

• S-Link Parallel Device for Linux
• How SONY's S-LINK/CTRL-A(II) protocol works