Fireplace project

[technicalpickles]

Our house has a fireplace. It has a gas log which should be replaced, and it's not even hooked up to gas. We put up a child proofing gate around it, just in case, which seems riduculous because there's not even anything in there.

BUT THERE COULD BE

I was thinking to put an unused TV in there, and do some automation. "Alexa, turn on fireplace", to start playing something like this fireplace. Could also be added to my christmas cheer automation.

I have a spare raspberry pi, so just need something to run on it. kodi has homeassistant support, and there's a few options

I started collecting some notes about kodi in the wiki. There's a youtube addon. I found this example to play stuff on the kodi:

service: media_player.play_media
data:
  entity_id: media_player.kodi
  media_content_id: "plugin://plugin.video.youtube/?path=/root/video&action=play_video&videoid=Xud-J6IQmLI"
  media_content_type: "video"

[technicalpickles]

Progress over in https://github.com/technicalpickles/picklehome-homeassistant-config/pull/9 so I can "alexa, turn on fireplace"

Some issues:

• loading a youtube file seems to take awhile, enough that alexa says the thing didn't respond in time. maybe a local file (or one served from local network) would be faster)
• TV has to be on. HDMI CEC stuff should help this, but I haven't had luck doing that
• if you were playing with settings, turning on the fireplace doesn't actually show the video, but you can hear it playing. Might be able to use the Input.Home to go home first

And ideas:

• setup a script to shift the color of the fireplace backlight over time, between yellow, orange, and red

[technicalpickles]

Went forward with stuff in https://github.com/technicalpickles/picklehome-homeassistant-config/pull/9

After a bit more testing, it seems that HDMI CEC works when waking up the screen, but I haven't seen it turn off so much. I was wondering if Kodi had some options for putting the display to sleep. https://beebom.com/kodi-tips-tricks/ suggests it does.

I could do something like:

• setup a screensaver
• turn down the time for "put to sleep when idle"
• activate the screensaver from the jsonrpc API if possible

[technicalpickles]

Actually, doesn't seem that osmc/kodi doesn't have the put to sleep when idle. I came across https://discourse.osmc.tv/t/no-option-to-put-display-to-sleep-when-idle/16644 which talks about this, and it suggests to use https://github.com/timker/kodi.screensaver.pimon

[technicalpickles]

Last weekend I setup samba to share a fireplace video. It loads a TON faster than youtube 😅

I installed and started using kodi.screensaver.pimon which turns the display off, and set the idle to like 1 minute.

The only problem there is the display is still on with "no input". Not sure if it does eventually go to sleep, but I know that turning on the fireplace does turn the display on if it wasn't on.

Since the Broadlink is right there, maybe I could just use that to turn on and off.

[technicalpickles]

I ended up setting up the homeassistant broadlink component over in https://github.com/technicalpickles/picklehome-homeassistant-config/pull/25 and figured I'd try using the remote. Work really well, so calling this done 🚢