The Tidbyt is a multi LED screen that comes in a nice wood enclosure and supports a bunch of open source apps, as well as an API run by the company that makes it. There are many ways to do the same thing with your own hardware, and this is not everyone’s preferred screen, but if you have one, I have some interesting tricks for Home Assistant users.
TL;DR link to my Github
The API that Tidbyt runs uses an app called pixlet. It’s a binary that runs on Windows, Max and Linux. I’ve been using the latter to run apps locally, and I wanted to share some of those here.
Anyone can build a Tidbyt app, but it has to be able to collect data from the internet and getting an app published is a bit of a hassle and slow.
Since I didn’t want to deal with that, I got pixlet up and running and been modifying the existing .star apps (Starlark is the language used to build them) and running them on an LXC Debian container in a Proxmox host.
I have a Now Playing app that will show what my Sonos speaker is playing. It pulls title, artist and album cover and displays it on the Tidbyt:
This will work with any media_player in Home Assistant. If HA shows media info, this script will show it on your Tidbyt. Someone smarter than me built the app, I just made it run on my own server and use HA automations to send it data.
There’s a Flights Nearby app that uses a paid FlightRadar API to pull nearby flight information. There is a free version of the API that has very limited calls, and even the paid ones have a monthly limit and there are overages if you use more. So, with Home Assistant, I turn this app on or off depending on my Office presence sensor.
Another app I liked was a Solar Stats/Generation one that is part of the Tidbyt Community, but it was made to work with a specific Solar provider website. With some tweaking, I got it to pull the data from Home Assistant. I use an Enphase Integration (and recently this newer method) on my HA, so I simplified the app to collect HA entity data. All it needs is a Production/Generation sensor and a Consumption one. It then calculates energy pulled from the grid.
The original app has multiple screens and ability to collect battery data and other information, but I didn’t spend the time to make that work with HA since I don’t have a battery. It should be pretty easy to do.
I recently discovered a new project that runs a lot of these apps in a more complex dev environment than what I use, and need to give that a shot. It’s called Pixbyt. The dev of that project has some interesting apps built. None of theirs are made to work with HA, but it should be easy enough to use that as a base.
My implementation relies on bash scripts and systemd services and uses ssh keys to allow Home Assistant to issue commands that control the behavior of the apps via pixlet.
I’ve been trying to document it all on my Github here, including links to the original code that I used.