Building a smart home theater with Home Assistant

I don’t have a TV in my room, but I have a projector. Until now I used to watch movies on my wallpaper, but the wallpaper is textured so the image quality is bad. So I decided to buy a screen, motorized of course to integrate it into my smart home. I've chosen this one.

After installing the screen on the ceiling, I immediately tried it out. The first problem I had was the screen lowering itself too far (1:1 aspect ratio) but I wanted it to stop at an aspect ratio of 16:9. While some people claim there are potentiometers to tweak the endstops, I didn’t found them and as this can result in damaging the screen, I discarded this idea.

#Prerequisites

• Home Assistant set up
• Know what a Sonoff is and how to flash it

#Ideas on how to control the screen

The controller is a box between the power outlet and the screen itself, and has buttons to move the screen up and down and stop the movement:

It also comes with a remote which has the same buttons as the controller.

While thinking about how to connect the screen to Home Assistant, I came up with three approaches:

1. sending RF signals to the controller like the supplied remote does,
2. adding an Arduino to "press" the switches on the controller via transistors,
3. replacing the controller with a Sonoff Dual.

My screen came with a 315MHz remote, but this frequency is prohibited in Europe. If it were a 433MHz remote, I would have read out the signals the remote sends and then sending them via a cheap 433MHz transmitter attached to the Pi.

The second one is possible, but I didn’t want to tweak the official controller too much in case I would need it later on (e. g. selling it).

So I settled with replacing the controller, which is probably the cleanest solution of those three.

#Connecting the Screen to Home Assistant

Upon inspecting my controller, I found out that there are two relays. One of them is active when the screen moves down, and the other one if it moves up. This means, I will need a controller with two relays. As I had great experiences using Sonoffs, I bought a Sonoff Dual which has two independently switchable relays.

Later on, this device will switch on the relays when I want to move the screen. To implement this, I decided to use esphome.

#ESPHome

ESPHome is a great library from Otto Winter and makes it easy to write sketches for hardware devices based on ESPs using yaml-files for integration with home assistant.

To install esphome, visit the official documentation.

Our controller acts like a garage door opener, and there is already a tutorial in the documentation here.

In this sketch, the relays are switched off after 60 seconds. I'll use this to stop my screen when the aspect ratio is 16:9,  which, for me, was after 29.5 seconds.

#Flashing the sketch

The first time we want to upload the sketch, we need to connect a programmer. You can find a great tutorial on the Tasmota project page. After the first time, we can flash the device via Arduino OTA, so our controller can safely be mounted in a wall as we normally won’t have to physically access it again.

Connect everything and run esphome my_screen.yaml run. Look for the IP address and write it down, you'll need it in the next step.

#Setting up Home Assistant

Open Home Assistant and go to Configuration > Integrations.

Then, from the list, search for ESPHome and press configure.

In the new window, enter the IP address of your ESP and press submit. There should now be a new integration which shows your cover entity.

#Wrapping up

This solution obviously breaks all warranty, but this is okay for me as my screen only cost $100. If my screen had come with a 433MHz remote, I would have used an RF transmitter, but afterwards I think the Sonoff solution is more reliable. With a WiFi solution, the controller can send back its state so that Home Assistant knows if the screen actually moved down.

My screen moves before a balcony door, and this door has a door sensor on it. That's why I created a template cover that only opens the real cover when the door is closed to prevent damaging the screen. You can read about that here.

Update 2019/01/17: updated for new ESPHome native API

Update 2019/04/08: renamed esphomeyaml to esphome and updated links