An Android Things-Based Volumio Controller

Last Saturday, April 14th, we partecipated to an hackathon, held by the guys behind Droidcon Turin 2018.

It's been a pleasant and exciting experience, with lots of coffee, lots of code and lots of passionate developers striving to bring their own ideas to life.

Like every hackathon ever, we spent a few hours debating what we should build. Since the beginning, we were sure we wanted to play with one of those shiny Android Things boards we've seen at the beginning of the day, but the idea of building something around Volumio tickled us.

Of course, we had to find a way to mix the two.

We wanted to do something that could either make Volumio more useful, or easier to use. We settled on the idea of making some sort of remote control, something you could strap on a wall or maybe in a coffee table.

And so, VolumioWall was born!

How does that work?

It's basically an Android app running on an Android Things starter kit, built with Xamarin, using the Volumio REST APIs to control playback using big, fat buttons on the screen (so you don't have to aim) or gestures, to reduce friction as much as possible.

The first roadblock we met was the lack of SDKs. We couldn't find any library for talking to Volumio, so we had to build our own.

We started playing with their socket.io-based APIs, but performance issues made us move to the REST ones, which, albeit less complete, seem faster and showed really minimal latency, which made the whole experience a lot more pleasant.

You can find all of the code on GitLab under a MIT license. Pull requests are welcome!