IMS and Home Assistant Communication

[David Ellis]

Hi. Has anyone attempted to get an IMS and Home Assistant to talk to one another? I am certain there is a way but after two days of trying, I am in need of help. Any help is greatly appreciated!

[Steve Guttag]

Try talking with Dolby technical support. The IMS3000 communication protocols are reasonably well documented. Their primary form, however is WSDL/SOAP based.

[James Gardiner]

I have been meaning to look into this myself. One day. But, I can see a reasonable amount of capability as .. I have posted in the past how you can emulate a http GET with Dolby (And likely others) socket communication. So, I expect you could do something. Just need to look. And I don't have any more time to work on pet projects. Too many already in the air.

[Ryan Gallagher]

The most direct path might be an intermediate translation device? Something to react to the home assistant commands and issue the corresponding IMS ones.

Maybe the Junior automation folks have looked into supporting this? Or a single board computer of any flavor.

Home assistant is open source, so I’m sure it is doable internally too, just might require more developer level knowledge in HA.

[Marcel Birgelen]

What direction do you want the communication to flow? And what type of calls do you want to do? Dim some lights? Start a show based on external triggers?

The IMS can do TCP callouts, which could simulate a HTTP call with JSON payload.

The cleanest way would be to implement a plugin for Home Assistant, but also the least efficient way, as in time spent on the project.

[Dustin Grush]

I played around with this somewhat last year and never quite got it to work with our Doremi using TCP raw data. The only thing that actually responded to the Doremi was the Node-RED application, and all I could get it to do was toggle a single input. No matter how many I added they would not function independently, and all they would do is toggle. I could not set ON/OFF values. I am generally bad at code/software things so it was probably errors on my part. Unfortunately that instance crashed without a backup and I haven't had time to mess with it this year. Would be interested if anyone has success.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Personally I’d probably play with Bitfocus companion (and thus Buttons) interoperability, but I can see the fun/utility if you already have a lot of HA controlled things.

[David Ellis]

What direction do you want the communication to flow? And what type of calls do you want to do? Dim some lights? Start a show based on external triggers?

The IMS can do TCP callouts, which could simulate a HTTP call with JSON payload.

The cleanest way would be to implement a plugin for Home Assistant, but also the least efficient way, as in time spent on the project.

Hi. From IMS to Home Assistant primarily. Once any type of communication is received by Home Assistant then within Home Assistant it can be made to do pretty much anything. For example, in our case lighting control.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Another route might be to tackle GPIO commands first... if the network and protocols route is too frustrating.

There is what looks like a handy framework for many microcontrollers called "ESPHome". Never used it myself but I have dabbled in ESP32 projects. They all can react to GPIO input and cause events in HA.
https://esphome.io/index.html

GPIO methods may not be as fully featured on the cinema server end, but it's one approach. You could certainly trigger a minimal set of lighting states. I assume this is for a home cinema setup? Using Home Assistant in a commercial cinema might be a bit "weird". ;-)