Hi there Plex-Community.
I just finished my Cronjob for the Raspberry-Plex-Box under my TV and thought i share my resulting python-script. Nothing fancy, but a nice way to ad some small home-automation-features to the Rasplex.
Have a look: RasplexMon
What it does:
- The Conjob runs every minute on the Pi and has no notable impact on the performance.
- It Checks if there is an active Session. If yes, it logs the session (timestamp connected user, show/movie-title) and sends a push-notification to my iOS device using pushover.
- If i am the user with the active session, the script reduces the brightness of my Philips HUE lightbulb in the living-room and sets the Volume of the Sonos speaker in the living-room to zero.
- If the script has already seen the active session it will not try to notify me (or control the lights/audio) again - until three hours have passed. Thus it will work again the next day, if i resume a show which i quit a day earlier after just having watched half of it.
What inside:
- The script itself is heavily based on the plexMon.py by Victor Wieczorek. I looked at the plexwatch-solution but found it to bloated.
- The SoCo-Library controls the Sonos Speaker.
- Phue, a Python library for the Philips Hue system, ist controlling the light.
What I did:
- I connected via SSH and remounted the /flash-directory ( mount -o rw,remount /flash ) to have write-access.
- Copied my script and all python dependencies to the folder (i did not use pip or any install scripts just copied all the modules i needed).
- Setup a cron with crontab:
 - Used /storage/downloads/ a my logfile-directory because its writable.
This is a typical logfile-Entry if friends are watching
2014-09-19 15:23:11 Tony watches A Great Hollyday in Sweden
This is a Logfile-Entry with actions, if I have an active session
2014-09-20 16:43:31 JohnDow watches To Protect And Infect, Part 2 2014-09-20 16:43:32 Attempting to connect to the bridge... 2014-09-20 16:43:32 Using ip: 192.168.1.109 2014-09-20 16:43:32 Using username from config: 2f724e2f724e2f724e2f724e 2014-09-20 16:43:32 Sending SetVolume [(u'InstanceID', 0), (u'Channel', u'Master'), (u'DesiredVolume', 0)] to 192.168.1.105 2014-09-20 16:43:32 Starting new HTTP connection (1): 192.168.1.105 2014-09-20 16:43:32 Received status 200 from 192.168.1.105
I am glad for any optimization-suggestions.
These are my first steps with python so please excuse the code-quality. But everything seams to work relatively stable. Is it OK to just drop the needed python modules in the directory? Can i read the log two times (as i did in the code)? So many questions...
Notes
- One would need a plexpass to read the active sessions from the Plex-Server.
- The Pushover-App works fine, but will have a one-time-purchase after a brief trial-period
- The HUE-Bridge has to be manually paird on first run (hit the button on the bridge)
- I tried to pause the sonos-speaker but settled on the mute commando. I just wanted the living-room Speaker to be silent. But if i send him the pause-commando while he was part of a sonos zone, i would have been required to unjoin him beforehand, which is a bit tricky, because it can throw an exception if i would blindly send the unjoin-commando and the speaker is currently not in a zone. So i just mute him.
