Is there such a thing as a battery powered universal remote that can send commands to HA? For example, my wife and I currently have a “dumb” fan and light controller in our bedroom. The remote controls the fan and lights that are attached to the fan. In our new house we are building our room will have can lights (on a TP-Link smart switch) and a fan with no lights. Since we are use to using our fan remote to turn off the lights from bed, is there a remote we can get that will send a signal to HA to turn off the bedroom can lights? Or, if there isn’t a battery powered remote, what about a button or similar that we could set on our nightstands that would turn off the lights?
This should be releasing at the end of the month, https://www.yio-remote.com/
The last version, available via Kiskstarter was a kit version and all units were supplied and very well received. This version will be fully built.
Integration with home assistant will be as easy as this:
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/566721352
Because of the relatively small volume it wont be cheap though.
That looks promising! Any idea what they will cost? Maybe around $100??
I believe the first version was around $350. This new one looks more polished and seems to have more features. Unless they have ramped up production, I wouldn’t expect it to be cheaper than that (maybe even more expensive).
They have a Discord channel where you can stay up to date: https://discord.gg/x3PHc5AT
Though I really like the remote, but it’s too expensive for how I view home automation. My main goal is to fully automate everything to a point you rarely want/need a remote. In the few cases, there is a tablet dashboard, magic mirror or smart phone. At a cheaper price point it would be worth it. But for this price I can just buy a spare smartphone and wireless charging dock and use Lovelace and turn on the screen 24/7, and still have some money left.
But ofcourse there are plenty people who do like a remote with physical buttons.
Yep. I like physical buttons for pause/rewind/play for movies in the dark.
I’m currently using a Philips TSU9400 programmable remote. It hasn’t been available for years and is starting to show its age. It cost way more than the YIO and is not as capable. I’ll definitely be getting onboard when it is released, might even buy two.
As well as Discord there is a forum:
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Thanks @tom_l !
@bphillips921 just ask away if you have questions about YIO. We’re preparing now for the Kickstarter campaign and will release more info soon.
I’ll keep an eye on the Kickstarter. It sounds like the Yio might be a pricey solution to just turn off a light, but I could see it being used elsewhere.
What about a Lutron Pico remote? Could I use that with HA (and a Lutron bridge) to turn off a TP-Link light switch?
YIO is much more capable than just turning on a light switch. But if you just want to do that, it might be an overkill in that case 
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The Lutron Pico Remotes are amazing and the response time is super quick. You can basically use a blueprint for each of the 5 buttons and tie them to a script of your choice. The only thing I would add is that you need the Lutron Pro Bridge which costs more.
My price for the price I got got was 120 but the remotes which was about 15 dollars each.
Hi
what devices do you have in the room(s) where you want to trigger something using a remote?
The case for my HA-Raspberry has an Infrared-Receiver connected, I’m using a old Sony Remote for a CD/Cassette-Player (RMT-CE95AD), setup “lirc” on the Raspberry, added the integration for lirc into configuration.yaml.
The tricky part is to find the lirc-configuration to translate the IR-Data into human readable data, but for many standard TV remotes they are available somewhere on the Internet
Looks for example like this ( extract from full file for the Sony, this remote has only 9 buttons):
begin codes
oper 0x5422
func 0x7122
band 0x7B26
KEY_PLAY 0x6626 # Was: play
KEY_STOP 0x0E26 # Was: stop
KEY_PREVIOUS 0x2E26 # Was: prev
KEY_NEXT 0x1126 # Was: next
KEY_VOLUMEDOWN 0x6422 # Was: vol-
KEY_VOLUMEUP 0x2422 # Was: vol+
end codes
Final step is to create automations for event “ir_command_received” (sorry, german UI )
In another room I have another Raspberry with an IR-Receiver connected, here I have an old Remote from a Hauppage TV-USB-Stick (I bet everybody has dozens of old TV-Remotes somewhere), setup LIRC and a small Python-Script to trigger events and automations via the REST-API in HA.
My HA is running as Home Assistant Core in a Python venv, using plain vanilla image for Raspberry, not sure if the Docker based solutions give you access to the hardware connected directly to the Raspi, if I recall correctly I had to enable IR in /boot/config.txt on both Raspberry.
I also read about IR-Receiver on a Arduino with ESPHome, but havn’t played with that yet.
Of course my homebrew solution is nowhere close to the functionality on the YIO
Armin
Im using some buttons and remotes all over my room. Ive attached one ikea tradfri 5 button remote to my pc, to switch between audio devices and so on. That works via a cheap preflashed cc (i cant remember that number) and zha. Next to my bed theres an osram smart+ mini switch to manually trigger my voice assistant and control the volume of my amp.
Also im using an esp8266 flashed with esphome and an ir-receiver module and an ir diode to controll my amp through home assistant. Im listening to the ir codes sent by an universal remote i got for like 15 euros on amazon set to samsung keys. Each received code gets sent to HA as event, split by node-red into key_events to which i can listen either with node-red or HA itself. That remote is used to control my amp and my xbox one (so i have the controll feeling of a smart tv, without actually owning one).