viral cloak
Amity is a fully open source project that uses a Raspberry Pi and a simple custom hardware board (Amity Fin) to control a home theater using HDMI-CEC. The remote for Amity can be a repurposed streamer remote like an Apple Siri Remote or a Amazon Fire TV remote, or a TV remote (Samsung, LG, Vizio) (there is a full list of known compatible remotes on the project site)
Over the last couple of weeks, Amity has gained MQTT support for integration with Home Assistant, allowing full control of everything it does. This is in addition to the already existing HomeKit support.
If you have experience installing HA on a Raspberry Pi, then installing Amity should be easy, as it is a very similar process.
Really, the only thing that takes some effort is obtaining the HDMI bridging PCB.
Amity works by splitting the HDMI-CEC bus/network between the TV, and the receiver. To the TV, Amity emulates a single playback device, and to the receiver, Amity emulates a TV. The A/V HDMI signal between the receiver and TV is not touched. Amity requires a traditional home theater centered around a receiver, anything input directly to the TV (including TV apps) won’t work because HDMI-CEC doesn’t provision its control. Using a simple streamer remote makes Amity easy to use by everyone.
I've been using Amity while developing it, and it has been surprisingly reliable (even to me, considering the HDMI-CEC approach), and easy to use.
The project on GitHub: https://github.com/retsyx/amity
A video demonstrating it in operation with a custom remote made especially for it (that particular remote is not necessary. Amity can be operated with one of several mainstream conventional remotes, see the GitHub page for a list).
