Turn M5StickC Into Universal IR Remote (Home Automation)

2020-06-29 | By M5Stack

License: General Public License

* Thanks to the project info and source code provided by @Alessandro Polselli

Hello everybody.

In this project I document how I changed my Home Assistant setup replacing the Logitech Harmony Hub for a cheaper, smaller, and more versatile M5StickC with just ESPHome onboard and a few lines of YAML configuration.

The ingredients are:

A running Home Assistant instance (mine is hass.io on a RPi4)
The SmartIR custom component
An MQTT broker (mine is the mosquitto hassio addon)
An M5StickC (or M5Atom, see UPDATE below)
The configuration/source files of this project

Due to the great ability of the ESPHome lib/firmware for templatable actions, I was able to setup the remote_transmitter component to translate generic JSON inputs into IR codes to transmit with just 16 lines of ESPHome YAML config.

So I built a firmware that acts as an MQTT->IR bridge, and that can run on a M5StickC (or a M5CameraF + grove IR transmitter), making it fully integrated with the smartir custom component of Home Assistant.

In this way I can set up several "media_player" or "climate" entities, with just the list of codes they support as commands.

The full Home Assistant configuration is here:

https://github.com/apolselli/home-assistant-config

UPDATE: You can even use a M5Atom (smaller, cheaper, + cool Led Matrix) for this project! For this device the YAML is here:

https://github.com/apolselli/home-assistant-config/blob/master/esphome/m5atom_ir.yaml