Hi, I wanted to get away from relying on my Harmony Remote since it has been discontinued. I wanted something that is fully run and reliant on Home Assistant. I strung a bunch of stuff together and wrote a blog about it in case anyone else is interested.
https://thehelpfulidiot.com/fully-local-universal-remote-control-with-home-assistant
Thanks for posting this. I was able to take what you had done and rejigger it to use a locally connected USB dongle and the native Keyboard Remote integration. One thing I found is that with the most current version of HA (2024.02.05) the binary sensor would just go unavailable as soon as I pressed a remote key. It seems like as_timestamp now requires an additional input to tell it what format to use (in this case, none). So those entries now look something like this:
as_timestamp( trigger.event.time_fired, none)|float(0)
Awesome man. Glad it helped. Yeah local control and the keyboard remote integration would definitely be ideal.