It's not really that novel. When I wrote a Sonos client (2007) there were a few out there already. Getting things working did involve a lot of time in Netmon (nee: Wireshark), and reading UPnP specs.
Yup, that's correct, though the old library in my repo still works and is used by some folks, maintenance of SoCo is handled by a group of very talented and friendly developers under https://github.com/SoCo/SoCo
It looks like the author used SoCo for the Raspberry Pi project mentioned at the bottom of the article.
Looks like a cool project, I just find it hard to believe he used wireshark to figure out the API on his own, given that he acknowledges:
Sorry to be cynical, my BS meter just went through the roof.