fauxmo VS pyatv

Voice control is about the only way my wife and kids interact with hass (in spite of other options). I (re)wrote an app for interfacing with Alexa[0] while my son was a neonate because it made such a difference to be able to verbally turn off lights while both hands were full carrying him around (or sleeping on my chest and I don't want to move).

For me, voice control is a must.

[0]: https://github.com/n8henrie/fauxmo

here it is https://github.com/n8henrie/fauxmo

It's definitely not impossible at least.

Someone is doing it in python here:

https://pyatv.dev/

GPT-4 actually sent me here:

"Here is an example of a C# library that implements the HAP: CSharp.HomeKit (https://github.com/brutella/hkhomekit). You can use this library as a reference or directly use it in your project."

Which, to no surprise based on my experiences with LLMs for programming does not exist and doesn't seem to have ever existed.

I get that they aren't magic, but I guess I am just bad at trying to use LLMs to help in my programming. Apparently all I do are obscure things or something. Or I am just not good enough at prompting. But I feel like that's also a reflection of the weakness of an LLM in that it needs such perfect and specific prompting to get good answers.

-> https://github.com/postlund/pyatv/issues/1931

I love Python, but I really wish I didn't have to use it here. The reason I do is that tvOS changed the way network remote control works, and the only library that could do that was / is a fantastic Python library called pyatv: https://pyatv.dev/.

1) Install pyatv via command line. The command pip install pyatv is one way to achieve this. The important thing is that path needs to be accessible to homebridge. For me, that was /usr/local/bin Before proceeding, I recommend reading more about the API as this will be helpful if you want to build additional switches that track power status or other attributes. https://pyatv.dev

You can use pyatv to do this and if MQTT is your thing you can use this plugin.

The video above is just a silly experiment, but the library that's driving it (pyatv) is super useful. For example, on my Mac I can press Cmd+Shift+R to toggle an Apple TV remote control. Really useful for pausing a video or jumping back a few seconds. The cool thing is that it also works on Windows, Linux, etc. People are investigating adding regular text input to the library as well.

There's not an API provided by Apple. There are 3 protocols that have been reverse engineered by different people. The main one I've found is a python library called pyatv (https://pyatv.dev/) that handles pairing and remote control commands.