Roman Garms' Blog

The Goal  Ever wish you could remotely control every light in your house? Control a PS3 from your iPhone? Create schedules to automatically turn on and off devices in your house in the most complex way possible? No? Hmmm.  It's a little more useful than that I promise. I was introduced to the world of Apple Homekit when my dad wanted his espresso machine to start in the morning before he gets out of bed. Nice little quality-of-life thing. But he went further than just a timer, he got an outlet plug that could be controlled by his phone. And I thought that was soooo cool.  We bought some more smart plugs, a smart light switch, and a couple of other things. Pretty cool to have all the lights in a room come on with a single switch, without any complex and annoying-to-undo-later wiring. Also a nice bonus that I could control them without getting up. But smart home equipment is *expensive*. And I already have a server computer. What if some of these devices could be smartified...

Project continues here: https://blog.romangarms.com/2022/06/raspberry-pi-spotify-display-auto.html Setup A while ago, I set up a Raspberry Pi 3B and cheap touchscreen display to show the song I'm currently listening to on Spotify. I did this by installing Raspbian, and then running Jon Ashcroft's Nowify  on the display, albeit with some slight modifications. I customized a couple of things. One, the "no music is currently playing" screen is now black, and less attention-grabby. Secondly, the font size got bumped up a little (a requirement for this tiny 7" screen, but still not enough!).  I also added one other helpful feature, though this one isn't a part of the Nowify site. I added integration with Apple Homekit through  Homebridge , which allows me to remotely turn on and off the display from my phone. Hitting buttons on my phone sends a signal to my computer hosting the Homebridge server, which sends a command over SSH to the Raspberry Pi to enable or disa...