Waking Up Gently with Sonos and Sirius XM and a Fade-In Alarm

My wife and I use LIFX smart lights in our bedroom to simulate sunrise, with lights activating at sunrise and gradually brightening over 30 minutes for a gentler wake-up experience.

She requested extending this concept to our Sonos speaker system. The desired features included:

• Selection of any Sirius XM, Pandora, or Calm Radio station accessible via Sonos
• Customizable maximum volume setting
• Adjustable fade-in duration (ideally 30 minutes)
• iOS app control on iPhone or iPad

As extra credit, I wanted reverse functionality for a gradual volume decrease as a sleep timer.

Initial Investigation

The native Sonos app alarms proved inadequate, offering only a 15-second fade-in rather than the requested 30-minute ramp-up. I discovered this was a recurring feature request in Sonos community forums, with unanswered requests spanning multiple years.

Solution Development

I identified SoCo, a Python library for Sonos control, which could accomplish approximately 60% of requirements via command-line automation through cron scheduling on a Linux server. This approach enabled:

• Scheduled program execution
• Volume adjustment across Sonos speakers or groups
• Station selection

Limitations

iOS app orchestration remained unavailable through this method.

Additional Features

• Holiday support via a holidays.txt file (YYYY-MM-DD format, one per line)
• Manual override capability via /tmp/holiday file creation for unplanned days off

Code

The alarm script is published on GitHub at https://github.com/tksunw/IoT/tree/master/SONOS.

I remain open to discovering an iOS app solution that could fully orchestrate this automation until Sonos or competing home automation platforms add native support.