SonosESP

Appearance

Everything it does ​

Playback ​

  • Full transport control — play and pause, skip, previous, shuffle, repeat, volume and mute
  • Multi-room — switch between Sonos zones, with live indicators showing which rooms are playing
  • Speaker groups — create and break groups from the panel
  • Complete library browsing — every source your speaker exposes, not a fixed list. See Music sources
  • Favourites from any service — anything saved in the Sonos app plays from the panel, Spotify and YouTube Music included, with no login on the device
  • Line-in and TV audio — dedicated screens when a soundbar is on TV input or something is plugged into the analogue input

On screen ​

  • Album art — decoded by the ESP32-P4's hardware JPEG unit, with PNG and progressive-JPEG support, and the dominant colour pulled out to tint the rest of the screen
  • Synced lyrics — time-synced from LRCLIB, following the track, hiding themselves when there are none, and colour-matched to the artwork
  • Accented characters everywhere — titles, artists, lyrics, menus, dropdowns and the on-screen keyboard all render Latin-1 and Latin Extended-A properly, so Beyoncé, Björk and Sigur Rós look right instead of losing their accents
  • Weather — current conditions and a 6-hour forecast from Open-Meteo, no API key needed
  • Three player themes and four clock faces — see Themes
  • Auto-dim — configurable idle timeout and dimmed brightness level
  • Clock screensaver — takes over when idle, with an optional photo background

Under it ​

  • Two panel sizes, one codebase — the 4-inch and 7-inch builds come from the same source. Type and spacing scale to the panel rather than being written twice
  • Updates over the air — from the panel itself, on a stable or nightly channel, resuming rather than restarting if a download is interrupted
  • Browser installer — flash over USB from Chrome, Edge or Opera, no toolchain to install
  • Settings survive updates — Wi-Fi credentials and every preference live in flash and are kept across reboots and firmware upgrades
  • Open source — MIT licensed, on GitHub

Not supported ​

Worth being straight about the edges:

  • Searching a streaming service's catalogue. You cannot browse all of Spotify from the panel. Save what you want in the Sonos app and it appears here.
  • Other ESP32 boards. The firmware targets specific GUITION hardware, see Hardware.
  • 5 GHz Wi-Fi. The radio is 2.4 GHz only.