Hi everyone,
I’d like to share MedienStop.de, a custom Home Assistant integration for families who want to manage children’s TV time at home.
I’m a father of five children, so TV time is not an abstract problem for me. It is something I know from everyday family life: agreeing on rules is one thing, making them work calmly and consistently is another. I built this integration to help with that, especially for families already using Home Assistant.
The integration is a free side project from my German website MedienStop.de. It is not meant to replace conversations or family rules, but to support them with clear budgets, time windows and automation.
What it does
MedienStop.de lets you create children, profiles, daily TV-time budgets and allowed time windows. It can count down the remaining time and automatically switch off a configured TV or media device when the time is used up, or when TV time is not allowed.
Main features:
- Daily screen-time budgets per child
- Separate rules for weekdays, weekends and holidays
- “School night” logic, where Sunday is handled like a weekday
- Automatic midnight reset, persistent across restarts
- Play, pause and stop controls per child
- Parent override, meal break mode and holiday mode
- Optional video or audio announcements before switching off
- Statistics per child for today, week, month and year
- Webhooks for custom automations
- Dashboard template generator and diagnostic tools
Requirements
- Home Assistant 2024.4 or newer
- A controllable TV entity, for example a
switchormedia_player - Optional: a media player for video or audio announcements, such as Cast, Chromecast, DLNA or an audio speaker
Installation
The integration can be installed via HACS as a custom repository, or manually from the release files.
GitHub repository:
More background about the project:
Feedback, bug reports and ideas are very welcome. The integration is still young, so real-world testing with different Home Assistant setups would be very helpful.
Thanks!
