homeassistant

I've enjoyed using it for a room controller for my AV distribution system. one of those perpetually unfinished work in progress projects and money-sinks.

So a few little wall mounted android things running fully kiosk browser, each one with it's own room control panel using the WallPanel add-on from HACS to get a customisable toolbarless view, card-mod for some custom CSS and a few other tweaks, also node-red running to do some logic, sequencing and handling the REST commands that are a pain to implement directly in HA. Each room panel has control over lighting, climate, TV and Audio. Each room has a TV connected to a 8x8 HDMI2.0 matrix with a selection of Nvidia Shields, TV and Sat tuners and an appleTV, along with a dedicated dashboard with weather, rain radar and camera views. This is all done in lovelace with custom navigation buttons instead of a toolbar in a simple grid layout with minimal options per page.

So when a user taps the media icon in their room, they get a list of available sources for the TV, guest rooms only have one Nvidia shield available (specifically for guest users) and the main bedrooms get their personal one. The shared living areas and theatre have access to any source so any user can pull up their dedicated shield with their content, apps and accounts.

This also means that I can push any video source to any room intelligently, so I can have a party mode that mirrors every screen, or use any form of presence detection to send a doorbell image to the nearest TV, or a surveillance feed, I just haven't implemented any of that as I dont need to yet.

The only difficulty is remotes, currently I'm using super cheap hacked OneForAll remotes with custom codes and macros, but if someone selects a source on the touch panel they have to select it again on the remote to get control, so mostly people change source with the remote as I have that set up in a macro. I despise using touch devices as a remote control. If I can get a smarter remote solution worked out I'll do it, it would require a man in the middle to process remote commands from the IR system, recognise the room it is in and the active source in that room and forward on the right commands to the matrix for distribution. possible, but a pain as I'd have to program it from scratch on an arduino or esp32, or more likely one per room.