HA-meural: custom integration for Netgear Meural Canvas digital art frames

Share your Projects! Custom Integrations
41

HA-meural has hit v1.0.0 and can be installed from HACS! The most important change is that the integration will now re-authenticate automatically when the auth token expires. In previous versions of HA-meural your Canvas would become unavailable when this happens, and the only way to resolve it would be to delete and reinstall the integration. As you can imagine, this was very annoying for every user :slight_smile: Many thanks to Harshit Sanghvi!

Updating to v1.0.0 does require you to delete and reinstall the integration once, so the correct new configuration entries can be setup.

42

Thank you @GuySie for the integration!

I’m a newbie and are trying to control the status on/off state of the frame but with no luck.
There are no actions visible of the device object if I try to create an automation.
Pushing the on/off switch of the card works ok so the integration is obviously up and running.

Any hints on how to proceed would be much appreciated!

43

Hi, and thanks! The Meural is set up as a media player, and will respond to the usual service calls for a media player. So using service calls media_player.turn_on or media_player.turn_off on the Meural entity should work:

Screenshot 2024-01-02 at 10.43.01
Screenshot 2024-01-02 at 10.43.012130×888 53.1 KB

44

Thx, its working.
For a newbie the object model isn’t obvious when you could switch things on and off and when you need a service to perform the action.
Anyway you always learn something.

/p

45

Thanks for this integration.

I’m wondering if it’s possible (with just a few lines of code) to display a snapshot from my video-doorbell to the meural, AND displaying the image very quickly (less than 2 or 3 seconds or so ?)

In my automation, I have this in the action part. Sending the Telegram works (I get to see the picture in Telegram. But the Meural doesn’t do anything.
Note: Yes, my Meural is called ‘Mural’ :slight_smile:

    action:
      - service: camera.snapshot
        data:
          filename: /config/www/camshots/voordeur.jpg
        target:
          entity_id: camera.reolink_deurbel_main
      - service: telegram_bot.send_photo
        data:
          file: /config/www/camshots/voordeur.jpg
          caption: Persoon
      - service: meural.preview_image
        data:
          entity_id: media_player.mural
          content_type: image/jpg
          content_url: /config/www/camshots/voordeur.jpg
46

Oh, to be honest, that’s mostly me being more used to Node-RED talking. Everything is a service call there so that’s how I talk about it. In the automation editor, you should be able to pick the domain ‘media player’ and ‘turn on’ and ‘turn off’ directly, and just pick the right entity. Great that it works!

47

I know some users of the integration are doing this exact thing with their Meural, so it should work. I don’t personally have a video doorbell so I have never tried it, and I don’t really know why it wouldn’t work.

What you could try - does it work if you use a full path instead of the relative one? e.g.:
content_url: http://homeassistant.local:8123/local/camshots/voordeur.jpg
instead of
content_url: /config/www/camshots/voordeur.jpg

48

I have a nabu casa account, using my own domain. I can create a working url displaying the image in a browser that has never visited that domain (*)

But when using this url in content_url: I get no image on the Meural.
Is there anything that needs to be set in the settings of the Meural?

(*) Does this mean that the folder /config/www/… is publicly available (so without authentication) ?

49

What are the chances NETGEAR Meural will be supported in the regular official home assistant list of devices? HACS seems a bit complicated to install reading the instructions so far. I was using the HomeBridge Meural plugins but it stopped working recently. This seems to be the only option now but I don’t want to break anything adding HACS on top of Home Assistant. Maybe I just don’t understand what I read so far but wanted to ask. I have a raspberry Pi 4b running Home Assistant. (Might upgrade to a Pi 5)

50

Not a great chance, to be honest. I’m a marketer, not a developer, so my code is not something that should go into Home Assistant’s core - this is very much a learning project for me. Have you looked at the installation instructions for the new HACS 2.0 version? It’s become much easier: Downloading HACS - HACS

52

I have been unable to change albums via automation. The attached sshot shows what I am doing. Two of the albums are titled “Christmas” and “Comic Artists”. I had it set to change from Christmas, back to Comic Artists on Jan 5th @ 8AM, however, it did nothing. So I manually ran the action and watched. The image on the Meural blinked to black for a half second and then went right back to the image it had. Album remained unchanged.

I figured, ok, maybe it doesn’t support spaces in the album name. So I changed in the automation to load “Halloween” and the same thing happened.

Am I doing something wrong?

image
image1497×656 46.1 KB

53

There’s definitely a bug in there; I just tested on my own device and it fails for some playlists as well. However, I can successfully select some playlists with a space in them, so that’s not a specific part of the bug.

If you go the detailed view of the meural canvas media player, and you click on the Source dropdown, do you see the playlists you are trying to change to? Are you using their names exactly as shown in that list, including capitalization, symbols and spaces?

I’ve also added this to the issues on github to keep track of:

54

Think I fixed it with v1.1.2, give it a try?

55

Sorry, I’ve been working. Absolutely fixed! I just manually ran both actions and they worked great. You are beyond awesome :slight_smile:

I just keep finding more and more reasons that make HA worth every moment of setting everything up and getting it all working. I hope this lasts forever :smiley:

1 Like
56

Hello,
I just started with Ha-Meural, THanks for this !

some question, did anyone write an automation that would scan a local media folder , and shuffle through all the images sending them to the meural each X minute? The idea would be to be independent on meural local/cloud and store the pics on a remote NAS folder mounted on HA, and just adding new pics, should eventually show them. Possible?

Another Q, did someone play with https://community.home-assistant.io/t/export-cards-to-png-jpeg to ask HA to temporarily display a dashboard on the meural?
tx!

57

I wish someone would come up with an open source firmware for the mueral frames. This integration works, mostly. But, I made an automation that switches the gallery from normal images to Halloween and then back to normal based on date, and everything worked in testing. But when the day came, the automation fired, but the gallery didn’t change. But if I go back into the automation, and click to run that part of the automation, it works. I’m at a loss hah. No errors of any kind that I could find. Just…mysterious.

58

agreed SW is a mess.

here some ssh hack, but no further development?
https://www.reddit.com/r/meural/comments/1icdf38/my_new_neural_horror_history_hacking/

59

From my perspective, Netgear seems to have entirely given up on the Meural line. Any changes made - they recently broke the integration by switching to a new authentication system out of the blue - are done without any changelogs, release information, or proper documentation. I think they leaned in on the crypto/NFT hype a few years back and figured that people wanting to display their monkey jpgs would save them. Honestly, at this point I wouldn’t put money on how many years the lines has until Netgear kills it.

I still have two canvas hanging in my house, and I’m happy enough with them, but I’m also investing time into checking out the new e-ink art frames that are coming onto the market. There’s a few really interesting ones out there.

60

hi
here s an answer I got from support
• While the MC227 hardware has transitioned to ‘End of Sale’ as we focus on newer generations, the Meural Cloud and platform remain fully active. We have no plans to ‘let the product die’; our cloud infrastructure continues to support the uploads, discovery, and library features that make the Meural experience unique.

a pity they don’t opensource the code, but who knows one day someone hacks it further :slight_smile: