Autostart FireTV Server

[benaranguren]

This looks like a totally different issue now. Is the IP address of your fire TV still the same after reboot?

[sytone]

@rpitera I have some more logging in my repo. I suggest running a new folder with fire tv in a virtual environment and when installing firetv-server use this to pull my current version to see if that helps you diagnose the issue further.

pip install git+git://github.com/sytone/python-firetv.git

You can then use -v on the command line to enable verbose to see if that gives you anthing else.

Example:

firetv-server -v -c /home/pi/firetv.yaml

[rpitera (Robert Pitera)]

@benaranguren

This looks like a totally different issue now. Is the IP address of your fire TV still the same after reboot?

Yeah; both of them are still at the same IP. Both are still running and pingable.

@sytone

I suggest running a new folder with fire tv in a virtual environment and when installing firetv-server use this to pull my current version to see if that helps you diagnose the issue further.

That’s a really nice offer; I’d like to try it out but I am in the midst of pre-beta testing for three other devs here so it may not be until later in the week.

I appreciate the help from the both of you; sorry if I hijacked the thread but I wasn’t getting any replies on my issue thread here or at the firetv repo.

I’ll update you as soon as I can and thanks again.

[CBRHerms (Adam Shearman)]

Have you tried manually starting the service with “sudo systemctl start firetv.service”?

I had this issue on mine after reboot’s as it tried to start the service before network was fully set up and so failed but wouldn’t restart correctly.

Changed my firetv.service to the following to sort out failure recovery:

[Unit]
Description=Fire TV Server
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=firetv
ExecStart=/srv/firetv/bin/firetv-server -c /home/homeassistant/.homeassistant/firetv.yaml
Restart=always
RestartSec=3

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Can you post your firetv.service?

[rpitera (Robert Pitera)]

@CBRHerms

Have you tried manually starting the service with “sudo systemctl start firetv.service”?

See my post above - it shows the output of doing just that.

[Unit]
Description=Fire TV Server

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/firetv-server -c /home/pi/firetv.yaml
Restart=on-abort

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

[CBRHerms (Adam Shearman)]

You’ve only posted the output from status. Which will be the status on boot as it didn’t reattempt to start the service on failure (on-abort restarts if there’s an error with the actual server install I believe?).

Change your restart setting to:

Restart=always
RestartSec=3

Then restart, and then check status again with:

sudo systemctl status firetv.service

[rpitera (Robert Pitera)]

Actually, that is the status after running it manually. Output from command line is shown just above:

Autostart FireTV Server

Well, right now I am unable to start up firetv-server. I am getting the following error: pi@raspi1:~$ firetv-server -c firetv.yaml Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/bin/firetv-server", line 11, in <module> load_entry_point('firetv==1.0.5', 'console_scripts', 'firetv-server')() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/firetv/__main__.py", line 235, in main _add_devices_from_config(args) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/firetv/__main__.py", line 22…

I am not sure what the restart options are going to accomplish if a command line start fails; wouldn’t that just cause a restart loop? I’m hesitant to do this and have the Pi get locked up.

[sytone]

Let me know if you get a chance to run against my repo. I can add more debug logging if needed.

[rpitera (Robert Pitera)]

I think I may scrap the whole thing and start over using your repo when I do.

[stunts1337]

Turns out you can send commands pretty quickly thankfully. So now ive got a script to do typing for me if I ever need to type something. (“hey google type (text) on the tv”), works good! Pretty happy this was an option since the harmony hub wasn’t cutting it.

[sytone]

@stunts1337 Nice! Want to post an example so others can see it?

[happyleaves]

Super cool!

[stunts1337]

Sure… first I edited the firetv code to include alphanumeric keypresses but then the script is pretty simple:

#!/usr/bin/python

import requests, sys
from time import sleep

#alphanumeric key dictionary
keys = {"a":"key_a","b":"key_b","c":"key_c","d":"key_d","e":"key_e","f":"key_f","g":"key_g","h":"key_h","i":"key_i","j":"key_j","k":"key_k","l":"key_l","m":"key_m","n":"key_n",
        "o":"key_o","p":"key_p","q":"key_q","r":"key_r","s":"key_s","t":"key_t","u":"key_u","v":"key_v","w":"key_w","x":"key_x","y":"key_y","z":"key_z"," ":"space",
        "0":"key_0","1":"key_1","2":"key_2","3":"key_3","4":"key_4","5":"key_5","6":"key_6","7":"key_7","8":"key_8","9":"key_9"}

#vars
baseUrl = "http://192.168.1.12:5556/devices/action/default/"
textToType = sys.argv[1]

#send keypress for each char if it is alphanumeric and in the keys dictionary defined above
for c in textToType:
    letter = c.lower() 
    if letter in keys: 
        requests.get(baseUrl + keys[c.lower()]) 
        sleep(0.2)

Then in home assistant I have a script:

type_on_tv:
    alias: Type text on fire tv
    sequence:
      - service: shell_command.type_on_firetv
        data_template:
          text: "{{ text }}"

and shell command:

type_on_firetv: "python3 -u /home/homeassistant/.homeassistant/python_scripts/typeOnFiretv.py '{{text}}'"

Lastly I use IFTTT to make the google assistant command that calls the rest api of home assistant to trigger the script and pass it the text field
doc: https://home-assistant.io/developers/rest_api/#post-apiservicesltdomainltservice

Admittedly it fails at times depending on what search box you are using and such… increasing the delay in the loop should be able to fix that so I may do that… or make it another argument for the script so its adjustable.