Another hobby I’ve been getting into more recently is Home Automation! Previously these posts would have been in Other, but it’s nice to have them all in one place.

A kitchen calendar display running on an Orange Pi Zero 2W

2025-02-12

The final display on the wall

I’ve been on a home automation kick for the last little while, so what better time than to dust off an old project and put up a home / family dashboard in the kitchen/dining room!

Previously, I had this running off a FireTV and MagicMirror. This worked well enough… but oh man is the FireTV browser terrible. Plus I had to do some crazy things to get it to stay on and never could get it to launch right back into the display on a power outage. So now we have version 2!

In the end, I ended up with:

An Orange Pi Zero 2W for the brains
Armbian for the operating system
Chromium as the browser (I did try Firefox first…)
Home Assistant for the data, remote control, and UI
- WallPanel to hide the side/top bar
- Browser Mod for remote control

Not too bad.

Setting up a Zigbee Tuya IR Blaster

2025-02-07

I spent long than I would have liked setting up a touch of automation for our home media center setup. Specifically, we have a projector, an HDMI switch, and multiple input devices connected to it (Apple TV, Steam Deck, Switch at the moment).

There are a few things that are suboptimal with this setup, but so it goes. One thing that’s been bothering me for a while is that there’s no great way for the switch I have to easily switch devices. It has a remote… but where’s the fun in that? (Plus we lost it for a few months).

So I took this as a chance to finally set up an IR transmitter with Home Assistant, using Zigbee Home Automation!

It was a bit confusing to get it all working, so I’m sharing it half so I can reproduce what I did if I ever need to or so that anyone trying the same can get it working.

A lot of what I did was based first on this blog post.