New Adventures in WiFi

The Broadlink RM Pro universal RF and IR sender has arrived. I want to use this device to control some of my audio-visual equipment that only has IR control. Being wary of giving up information to some companies, I was keen to find a way to control this device without relying on the Broadlink e-Control  app. This led me to Home Assistant , which I'll talk about in another post . In order to get the RM Pro on the network, I installed the e-Control app on my Android device, but denied it from having any permissions, other than those that were necessary to get the device working. I then blocked any outgoing internet traffic from this device using my WiFi router, to permit local control over my network, but prevent the device from dialing home. I then commenced setting up the RM Pro in Home Assistant.

I found out about Home Assistant while searching for a solution that would let me control a Broadlink RM Pro  locally over the network. Already having access to a Raspberry Pi Zero W , meant that there was a reasonably low barrier to entry to get Home Assistant running. After a bit of reading , and given that I already had Rasbian Stretch installed on the Pi Zero W and am reasonably comfortable with Linux, I decided to install Home Assistant in a Python virtual environment (venv) . I also set up Home Assistant to autostart using systemd . The Pi Zero W is not really recommended for running Home Assistant, and I did run into some issues that may have been caused by low specs of the device. Specifically, I had installation of some pre-requisite packages fail, and some updates failed, which I suspect was due to some activities timing out. Also, the CPU usage would regularly sit on 100% for minutes at a time when trying to check the configuration or restart Home Assistant...