My living room has, for the purpose of this project, three things:
- A projector (BENQ W2000), which has a remote control for turning it on.
- A set of speakers controlled by a Raspberry Pi and turned on by a remote-controlled power outlet (link in Swedish).
- A computer, which might or might not have options to turn it on besides the button on the case.
It is annoying to have to do three things whenever I want to turn this system on or off. So let’s fix this.
For this project I intend to use:
- A Pulse-Eight USB-CEC adapter, to talk to the projector.
- A Tellstick Duo, to talk to the power outlet.
- Maybe something else I don’t know about yet, depending on what options exist for turning on the computer.
- A Raspberry Pi Zero W, to control it all.
The idea is to use the remote for the projector to control it all. When I turn on the projector, or press one of a number of buttons on the remote, the projector will send a signal through the HDMI cable using CEC (which I will describe in a future post). The adapter will capture this and send it through USB to the Raspberry, while maintaining the video connection between the computer and the projector.
If the system is going to be turned on the Raspberry will use the Tellstick to turn on the speakers and something I don’t know about yet to turn on the computer. In all other cases the Raspberry will talk to the Raspberry in the speaker system over the LAN and to the computer over USB (or possibly also LAN).
This is more ambitious than my last project, to be sure. In my next post, I will start by investigating how the computer can be turned on.
Posts in this project:
- Investigating how to turn on my computer
- Intermission: setting up the Raspberry Pi for this project
- Setting up a Tellstick Duo on Linux in 2018
- Controlling the outlets
- Exploring HDMI-CEC
- Using pexpect to interface with cec-client
- Making the script talk to the computer
- Simulating keystrokes remotely with xdotool
- Fixing the lag but not the volume
Anton's projects 