I’m thinking about getting a larger television, as what I have is a bit too small for the living room. I have an inexpensive soundbar that mostly works, but doesn’t always turn on with CEC, and occasionally stops passing the video signal through and needs to be power-cycled.
Are there any TVs and soundbars out there that can integrate with Home Assistant, and don’t need a cloud connection at all? (Not even for initial setup.) I was about to buy a Sonos soundbar when they were on sale last month, but discovered that you don’t actually own Sonos devices, since setup is locked behind a cloud account and the company could change the terms of access at its whim.
I’ve read encouraging things about the Sony Bravia devices, and the manuals seem to say that you can set them up entirely locally (although some features are cloud-only). Is this still the case?
I bought an LG commercial display, which was roughly double the cost of an equivalent LG TV.
It’s awesome, it has 2x HDMI inputs and no smart features at all. It is supposed to go in video walls (big arrays of tiled TVs) so don’t need all that AI stuff.
Control is via RS232, so I soldered a connector onto an ESP-32 and installed ESPHome on it to control power, volume and screen.
A soundbar isn’t quite right for me, but again I would recommend something with RS232 and use an ESP-32 (if you like hacking) or a commercial rs232 to ethernet adapter (like this) if you don’t.
How’d you manage to snag one of those displays? LG won’t give me an actual price.
Just search the model#, amazon and others will pop up.
Why didn’t I ever think about RS232 control with an ESP32 device? Great idea!
There’s also this cool Zigbee IR blaster device that can learn the IR codes and then fire them out from HA if you don’t have the stomach for ESPHome.