The unexpectedly complex rabbit holes involved in making music playback a 1-click experience
All I wanted was to press a button and hear SomaFM Groove Salad through my home stereo. 🎵
What I got instead was six weeks of diving into AV receiver telnet commands, Raspberry Pi power mysteries, and NFC webhook proxies. Sometimes I spent an entire week debugging my Home Assistant setup only to discover I’d been using the wrong IP address the whole time 🤦♂️.
But here’s the thing: the journey is the reward. Sure, I could have just lived with telling Alexa to turn on my AV receiver, connect to it over Bluetooth, then asking it to play what I want. But then I wouldn’t have learned how UPNP broadcasts get mangled by WiFi bridge modes, or that a 2.2W Raspberry Pi can teach you more about power supply stability than any electrical engineering textbook.
This is the story of how a simple goal—press button, get music—led me down some of the most beautifully complex rabbit holes I’ve explored in years. And why that complexity is exactly the point. 🐰