Hi!
I just recently switched from an AppleTV to an nVidia Shield TV, and I am loving it! I am also using Home Assistant to automate a lot of stuff in my house (aren’t we all?) and previously I have been using the state of the AppleTV as conditions in some of my automations. I would love for the same options using the nVidia Shield.
I would be endlessly grateful if someone would write a component for the Shield or Android TV in general!
Android TV works with Cast component.
Yes it does, but only when you’re casting content to the shield. If you’re using Netflix, Plex, Hulu or any other app, you get nothing… Even using Plex (which has two different Plex components) I cannot get any useful info into HA.
If you are using kodi on your nvidia shield there is a kodi control.
As @magnus.overli said, it works for some really specific applications. It would be awesome to have a standard component (even if it needs to install an application on the Shield itself) working for all media players (at least) on the Shield, like Hulu or Netflix.
The Logitech Harmony Hub can pair to the SHIELD via Bluetooth to send commands. Obviously this is a one-way street, no getting media player status back out of the SHIELD, but it is reliable in my own testing and can be used to send device commands (remote button keypresses) to the SHIELD.
Thanks guys for coming up with possible solutions to this!! Really, I am surprised almost every day by how engaged and creative people in the home automation game are, and HA-people in particular! One of the reasons I chose HA when starting with all this craziness!
Like @kernald said, for me at least, the only thing I need is a state from the player. Does it play or not? I don´t need any command input, no control from remotes, no load analysis or system monitoring. I don’t know that much about this, and so I may be asking for way more than I realize, but coming from an AppleTV which had this feature, it is hard to let it go.
I was briefly thinking about maybe setting up a template to monitor the power drawn by the Shield, using the Aeotec or Fibaro power plugs, in order to extrapolate enough data to decide whether or not it was playing, but then I remembered that the Plex Media Server is also running on the device and so making measuring power utterly useless! 
Thanks again, and keep the suggestions coming. Sooner or later it will work out!
I have kind of the same need (except I don’t use many media applications outside of Kodi and the Cast capability), so I might give a shot at writing an Android application to run on the Shield which would monitor the media player status (I’m not sure what level of details I could get with a simple application, but that’s worth taking a look). I don’t have any free time these days, but I’ll definitely keep you posted if one day I have the opportunity to give this a shot.
Well kodi is well catered for in homeassistant, so no issue there that I can see.
For a test “whether android app X is running” how about approaching it with tasker? “When cast app starts send message to HA”. Perhaps even via MQTT?
Oh and I see google cast is covered by HA too
Google Cast and Kodi, yes. The built-in YouTube, Netflix… applications aren’t. Tasker might be a good approach indeed.
I was able to use ADB via network to detect the app on screen and use the result to automatically dim lights depending on which app was running on-screen.
Works great but surely can be improved