SonosESP

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
  • Sleep timer — the Sleep button at the bottom of the player stops the music after 15 to 90 minutes, with +15 and Turn off. It uses the speaker's own timer, so one set by voice or in the Sonos app shows up on the panel as well. On all three player themes

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. Cued to the millisecond, so a line lands on its beat rather than up to a second late
  • A progress bar that actually moves — the speaker only reports its position once a second, and only when asked, so the bar used to advance in steps. The panel now keeps its own clock between readings and interpolates, while still deferring to the speaker: a seek from the Sonos app is picked up within one poll
  • 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 five clock faces — see Themes
  • Auto-dim — configurable idle timeout and dimmed brightness, down to 1% on the 4-inch. While the clock screensaver is showing, a new track no longer lights the screen up
  • Night hours — Settings → Display sets a window where the panel rests darker, or fully off, with its own touch-wake brightness. The first touch at night brings the screen up without dismissing the clock, so checking the time in the dark does not throw you into the player
  • Clock screensaver — takes over when idle, with an optional photo background. The Amber face also shows when a sleep timer will stop the music
  • Battery levels — Move and Roam show their charge in the Speakers, Groups and Rooms lists and on the player itself, on all three themes: green from 50%, yellow below that, red and blinking under 20%

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
  • Restart history — Settings → General lists the last eight restarts and why each happened, so a panel that restarted overnight can say why
  • 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.