I wanted a nice Tuneshine for my home but it is not for home assistant, it is not cheap at all and i love DIY so I made this one and a llm named it Covercast :
I used basic aliexpress parts, a rasp 0w and a few php. It works quite well at home, love to see my music / TV cover on this screen (wayyy better IRL than my photo!).
The (bad) code is here GitHub - alfredit/CoverCast if you want something ready to deploy, there is an http API to set the state of the screen, on off, music or apple TV cover.
yep, this is a single panel but you can make a full wall with it. The problem is electricity since you need 5v/3amp for a panel, little more than a regular TV at the same size i thing.
Creator of Tuneshine here- nice work! I focused on streaming services first in part because I figured that media server and home automation users would be more likely to be able to DIY it like you have here. The basic concept is of course pretty easy to build, the hard part is making setup easy for non-technical folks. Glad to see you were inspired to make one that works well for your setup!
Hi, Tuneshine is so great, i love the job you did. Working first on streaming services was the good idea.
I’ve heard about your product on the vergecast podcast, the basics parts were very simple to buy / code (raspberry / php / P32121) but I do not want to promote a complete knockoff. People searching for simplicity and not owning a HA server should simply get a Tuneshine.
Making the first 80% was simple, the last 20% are very complicated to execute and make a living for. You did it very well.
A question, how did you made a good photo of this screen ? I cannot show it to my friends since the screen is so pale with my phone.
I would actually encourage anyone who is interested in tinkering to give the DIY version a shot- it’s a fun project!
I also forgot to mention that I do hope to support HA sometime in the future- hoping to start working on it this summer.
I find that sometimes dimming the screen and taking a photo in a dim room can produce better results. For some shots I overlay the album cover in photoshop to make it look more true to life (scale album cover to 64x64 with nearest neighbor scaling, scale it back up, overlay and transform with a “multiply” blend mode on the layer). I’ve also heard that being ever so slightly out of focus can help, but this is tricky with a phone!
Great, it’s time to get my 5D-MK2 out of the drawer for a out of focus time!
The home assistant integration will be cloud free ? The esp32 may be light for processing full images (that’s why i took the raspberry).
I think the first iteration will likely require the cloud for setup, but I do eventually want to allow a cloud-free option for services that don’t require it, including HA.
It’s a bit trickier to process images on an ESP32 but with the ESP32-S3 I’m it’s perfectly capable of performing image resizing on-device with libraries like JPEGDEC.
