Replacing broken home theater automation

Hardware
1

Hello all. I’m new to HA, looking for reviews/corrections of my plan. I’m a software engineer with a pretty strong general tech background.

We’re the new, third owners of our house. It has a very cool home theater. Originally - circa 2008 - there was some kind of cobbled-together proprietary control system. Flash forward to a useless tangle of broken pieces, which I’ve mostly removed.

So we’re running all the stuff in the room with 3 remotes and the Insteon keypad on the wall. Awkward.

My goal is to build a dedicated HA setup to control the room without spending a fortune. Not very interested in automating the rest of the house.

The AV equipment is 4 to 15 years old, but excellent and works great. No upgrades for now. Wired and WiFi network in the room.

Summary…

IR remote controlled:

  • Epson Home Cinema 8350/8700 projector
  • Pioneer VSX-LX301 Receiver
  • Polk Audio DSW Pro 660wi Sub-woofer
  • Samsung UBD-M8500 Blue Ray DVD w/ streaming apps (YT, Netflix, Amazon, etc.)

Insteon devices;

  • room lights switched at keypad
  • stadium stair lights remote on/off
  • two other sets of lights remote dimmer
  • powered recliners on/off

My plan:

  • Replace all the Insteon with Zigby controlled switches and dimmers.
  • Dedicated headless Intel N100-based mini running Linux and HA. Something like this.
    • USB Zigbee hub. Looking at SONOFF ZigBee 3.0.
    • Broadlink / Bestcon RM4C Mini IR blaster
  • Dedicated Android tablet in the room for a control dashboard.

My main worry at this stage is putting together usable, reliable hardware. Not so much about configuration - yet at least :slight_smile: . Figure I can make it work eventually like any software project.

I really appreciate the help for a noob at HA. All critique and suggestions very extremely welcome.

2

To control the components, I use two IR blasters controlled by a global cache GC-100-12. Setting up my media room was the first thing I did with home automation. There is a huge database of IR codes available through them.

Control Tower IR Database.

You can write scripts to control the components in HA. Here is one I use to turn on the Epson projector.

service: remote.send_command
data_template:
  entity_id: remote.epson
  command: poweron
  device: remote.epson

I wrote an automation which calls a script to turn on the system

- id: 'Rack On-Off for Theater'
  alias: Rack On-Off for Theater
  description: Boolean toggled from off to on. Run script to turn on theater rack
  trigger:
  - id: 'on'
    platform: state
    entity_id: input_boolean.racktheather
    to: 'on'
    from: 'off'
  - id: 'off'
    platform: state
    entity_id: input_boolean.racktheather
    to: 'off'
    from: 'on'
  condition: []
  action:
  - choose: 
    - conditions: "{{ trigger.id == 'off' }}"
      sequence:
      - service: script.avracktheater_off
    - conditions: "{{ trigger.id == 'on' }}"
      sequence:
      - service: script.avracktheater_on
    default: []
  mode: single

avracktheater_on:
  alias: Rack On For Theater
  sequence:
  - service: switch.turn_on
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id:
      - switch.media_room_rack_duplex
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 500
  - service: switch.turn_on
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id: switch.media_room_vizio_tv
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 500
  - service: remote.send_command
    data_template:
      entity_id: remote.nadz0
      command: poweron
      device: remote.nadz0
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 750
  - service: remote.send_command
    data_template:
      entity_id: remote.nadz0
      command: input1video1
      device: remote.nadz0
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 750
  - service: remote.send_command
    data_template:
      entity_id: remote.epson
      command: poweron
      device: remote.epson
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 750
  - service: remote.send_command
    data_template:
      entity_id: remote.hdmi
      command: gtvtomediaprojector
      device: remote.hdmi
  mode: single
------------------------------------------------------------------------
avracktheater_off:
  alias: Rack Off For Theater
  sequence:
  - service: remote.send_command
    data_template:
      entity_id: remote.nadz0
      command: poweroff
      device: remote.nadz0
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 750
  - service: remote.send_command
    data_template:
      entity_id: remote.epson
      command: poweroff
      device: remote.epson
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 750
  - service: switch.turn_off
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id:
      - switch.media_room_rack_duplex
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 500
  - service: switch.turn_off
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id:
      - switch.media_room_vizio_tv
  mode: single
3

That’s a great help. Thanks.

Can you explain why you need 2 blasters? Is it a physical space thing? I might need something like this as some IR devices are inside cabinets with partitions, and of course the projector is at the back of the room. The old system had kludgy IR output wiring to the projector driven by a no-name, discontinued hub device. Was hoping the blaster could reach it without help. A shame Logitech killed Harmony. That looks perfect as it had both wired and on-board IR emitters. Sigh. GlobalCcshe looks interesting, but overkill for my application.

Wdyt about mini-PC vs Pi for the platform? I was also looking at HA Green or Yellow as alternatives, but a Linux PC appears more flexible going forward at about the same cost.

Also thanks for the script ideas. I’m thinking in terms of three initially:

  • House lights: default when entering, getting seated, exiting. (Maybe later activated automagically by people entering the room.)
  • Curtain down: All electronics on, low lights.
  • Curtain up: Lights out except stairs. Projector on.

It will be gravy if the dash can also control audio and streaming apps.

Thanks again for the help.

4

I have the rack holding all of the components in a corner and the one blaster will not reach all of the components in the rack and the projector mounted on the ceiling.

The blaster to the projector is about 15 feet. Here are pictures:

PXL_20240214_172714153.MP
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PXL_20240214_172722564.MP
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In the first picture you can see the blaster pointing to the projector on the lower right. The one to the rack is the black wire above the speaker.I did not have enough wire to hide it in the wall. The rack has two AV receivers as I have a whole house audio system which adds complications. the 4x4 hdmi splitter allows me to display on multiple displays at once. Global cache makes a IP2IR that I thought about getting but have been reticent to buy more hardware.

I use a refurbished dell that I bought at Microcenter for ~400 that has a 6 core intel processor with a 1 tb drive and 32gb of memory. Before that I ran on an old supermicro 1u 1/2 depth server that ran 2 celeron cores and 8gb of memory. I currently run linux mint with virtualbox but when I have to redo it I will switch to proxmox because I will consolidate my pihole and home assistant and possibly my nas server.

I would not run a pi for home assistant as it most likely will end up doing more than just the media room. You are limited in the number of integrations with pi. I have 35 integrations and it just seems to keep growing. I would look at MATTER compliant hardware for your system. They are the future in my opinion and will keep your ecosystem much cleaner. I have z-wave, shelly and sonoff. In z-wave I use Jasco for light switches and outlets. I use fibaro for leak sensors.

If you want a more detailed discussion PM me and we can talk.

5

Thanks for taking the time to spell this out.

I need to take more photos. Here’s the one I have right now. The screen and three front speakers make up pretty much the whole opposite wall except for a built-in cabinet below. That’s where the equipment lives behind IR-transparent grill cloth.

I really like that rack in your room. No such luck in this setup.

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6

IMHO I wouldn’t dump insteon if it works, but I really wouldn’t dump it for zigbee. Go zwave before you do zigbee.
Zigbee is a headache waiting to happen. Zwave is much more fault tolerant. Uses lower frequency that doesn’t get interference from wifi and microwaves and has better propagation.
N100 mini pc should be total overkill if all you plan on doing with HA is your theater, but it will work well.
Just be careful of the type you linked to as those cheap boxes have been known to ship with malware in the windows install. Don’t hook it to your network OOTB. Wipe the drive and install something else over whatever is on it.

Check out the zooz line of stuff for zwave. They work well, have good customer support and are not too expensive.
https://www.thesmartesthouse.com/collections/zooz
Wired and wireless switches and scene controllers (keypad…ish) and a USB zwave stick and you’d be done from what you said. Since you’re starting new do all zwave 800.
This is all my experience and opinion, but every time I see someone just starting out with home automation and they say they think they want zigbee I cringe because my experience was so frustrating.
Good luck!

7

Dan brings up a very good point but it can happen with either standard. Here is a good article on the differences.

I will also say that you can have problems with Wi-Fi as well. I have multiple Shelly motion sensors that were basically bricks with my unifi infrastructure until a kind soul on this forum mentioned increasing the bandwidth on 2.4GHz Wi-Fi to 40MHz. Now they are rock solid.

I have 87 Z-wave devices in my house. I feel like the switches fail too often in the relays (you can here them endlessly click when they fail). I always have spares on hand to replace when necessary. There is nothing worse than a malfunctioning z-wave network. It can be very difficult to find the offending node.

I have shelly, sonoff and z-wave devices and all have had problems. Pick your poison. I do not have zigbee so I can’t speak to those issues.

I will try to share what I can when you post the new photos.