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Some of us only switch phones when the old one gets past the point of being usable, but most people like to upgrade from time to time, whether it’s to get a better camera, performance, or some other new feature. But when you do that, you have to answer the question of what to do with your old phone. Do you just change it? Throw it away and contribute to electronic waste?
Another (and potentially better) option is to repurpose it to do something else, like turning it into a remote control for all your smart home devices. Yes, it is possible and all thanks to Home Assistant.
Home Assistant brings your devices together
Ecosystem barriers don’t matter
It would be great if all smart home devices worked well with a specific ecosystem, whether it’s Apple’s HomeKit, Google Home, or Amazon Alexa. But most devices want to have an Internet connection and use their own ecosystem, which can generally it supports some of those options, and it’s a disaster. For these things to work properly, a bunch of apps and accounts are required.
Fortunately, Home Assistant can solve almost all of that and make your smart home experience that much better. My smart home is a simple thing and we only have a handful of devices, but they are also devices that I never expected could be used in a single interface, and Home Assistant makes that possible.
I can control my LIFX and Xiaomi light bulbs, manage playback on my Google Cast-enabled devices, control my LG TVs with a remote, and even see the ink levels on my printer, which I definitely didn’t expect considering it’s a 2014 model. All of this comes together in one interface and it’s wonderful.
But where does your phone come into play?
Turn your phone into a remote control
Create a custom dashboard
Naturally, Home Assistant has a smartphone app that you can use to control your home, but if you want to turn your phone into a remote control, you might want to do a little more than the basics. On the one hand, it’s probably worth setting Home Assistant as your default “launcher,” so it’s the first thing you see when you unlock the phone (on that note, maybe removing any unlocking methods from the phone would also help). Home Assistant doesn’t appear as a home app by default, but you can enable it by going into the app’s settings and then you can replace your home launcher with it.
After that, it’s a good idea to design a dashboard specifically for use with your phone. I’ll be honest, although I’ve had Home Assistant for over a year, I’ve never set up a good dashboard for it and that’s definitely put me off using it more. But this time, I created a new dashboard and configured it correctly with all my devices.
On top of my board, I placed the two smart lights we have in the house right now. While they are from different brands, you wouldn’t really know it by looking at the cards here, and that’s really cool. In fact, they also have different features, as only one supports RGB, but that only becomes apparent when I long press them to see more information. One thing you need to pay attention to is what type of cards you are adding. There are specific light cards that include brightness control directly on the dash, but there are also button cards that only turn the lights on or off.
For my TVs, I have a Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) integration called simply LG WebOS remote controland it is exactly what it says. Since these are smart TVs, they are connected to the Internet and I can completely control them here. In some ways this is even faster than using my actual remote, as using the TV’s UI is usually quite slow. These cards allow me to open apps or choose an HDMI input without waiting for the TV menu to open, so that’s great.
I also plan to add a Chromecast TV remote to my living room TV dash that has a Chromecast connected. This makes it easier to control both the TV and Chromecast with a single device, without having to juggle remotes. You can do this with the Android TV remote integration for Home Assistant, but if you don’t want to set things up manually, you can also use the Chromecast Google TV Remote Integration from HACS to automatically configure a remote control that looks like the physical remote control with working buttons.
Finally, I added a section for media controls so I can see what’s playing on my speakers, displays, and smart TVs with Google Cast and easily play/pause.
You can be even more inventive
Home Assistant goes much further
This is all already great, but as I mentioned, my setup is pretty simple. You can definitely do even more with your smart home depending on how many devices you have and what kind of workflows you need.
In my case, the furthest I got was creating a way to cast YouTube videos to devices like my Chromecast or my Nest Hub. The Google Cast integration allows you to do this by creating a script, but at first you might think that you have to create a specific script for each video, since the ID of the media to be cast must be specified in the script.
Fortunately, and with the help of my colleague Adam Conway, I created a text wizard in my dashboard that allows me to enter a YouTube URL, then modified the example script to use RegEx to parse the media ID for that URL. I can now copy a YouTube URL and play it on my TV or Nest Hub using my phone and Home Assistant. Of course, if you do it this way, you need a way to access the YouTube app or website to get the link, but this is still more useful with my main phone than with a dedicated smart remote like this one.
Home Assistant is a win in every way
Repurposing your old phone as a remote control for your smart home is just one of the benefits of using Home Assistant. As I already mentioned, it’s amazing that you can bring all your smart devices into a single ecosystem and make them easily controllable, while also reducing your dependence on the cloud services that manufacturers want you to use. Plus, since the Home Assistant server doesn’t require powerful hardware, it’s also a great way to repurpose an old computer.
- SW
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Windows, macOS, Linux
- iOS compatible
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Yeah
- Android compatible
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Yeah
