Pinging a WiFi USB adapter on a dumb TV USB port to tell if it is on or off

Hardware
1

I have a dumb TV that I’d like to be able to tell when it’s turned on or turned off, to turn on or off some lights at the same time.

Would I be able to get a cheap USB WiFi adapter like this, set it up on a PC to connect it to my network, plug it into the TV’s USB port (which would power off when the TV is off) and ping it to identify the power state of the TV?

If not, is there some other USB device I could use?

2

I doubt that would work as the USB Adapter just provides the hardware, the drivers on the host OS do the actual work to connect to the WiFi.

If you were up for some programing and flashing, using a chip such as this: https://www.wemos.cc/en/latest/d1/d1_mini.html running firmware such as this https://esphome.io/ would get you going. You wouldn’t even need to solder anything, just use a USB cable to plug it in. Initially you would flash ESPHome onto the chip on your computer (with the config to connect to HA etc), then connect it to the TV. It wouldn’t need any sensors etc, just use the “online/offline” state in HA.

I have not done exactly this, but have used all of the parts and see no reason it wouldn’t work. The parts at least only cost a few $.

3

Thanks for confirming what I thought would probably be the case :slightly_smiling_face:, I had come across similar situations that mentioned ESP8266 but had no idea how I’d go from there, but this does give me some direction now, thank you!