tjntomas / Send-blueotooth-remote-event-to-Home-Assistant

Catch bluetooth remote events keycodes on a Linux machine and send to Home Assistant as events

Catch bluetooth remote event keycodes on a Linux machine and send to Home Assistant as events to use in automations etc.

This repo contains files to build a docker container that will monitor input devices connected to a linux machine, for instance bluetooth remote controls, but any input device can be monitored. The resulting keypress codes will be sent to your Home Assistant instance. It's tested and works fine on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian or an Intel NUC running Ubuntu. If you get it to work on any other Linux distribution, please leave a comment.

The instructions assume that you know how docker containers are built and run and that you have already paired your bluetooth remote with the linux machine so I'm not including any instructions for pairing or for using the docker commands.

1. Find the input device to use

First, download the bt_remote_docker folder in this repo and ssh to the bt_remote_docker/code directory. Make sure you have pip installed required modules in the /code/reqs.txtfile. They are only needed to run the find_devices.py script.

Run sudo python3 find_devices.py. Sudo is needed to access the /dev/ devices. This will list the device names and the device paths for all input devices on your machine. Example output from an Ubuntu machine:

• Telink Trust Keyboard & Mouse event8
• Telink Trust Keyboard & Mouse System Control event7
• Telink Trust Keyboard & Mouse Consumer Control event6
• Telink Trust Keyboard & Mouse event5
• HDA Intel PCH HDMI/DP,pcm=10 event18
• HDA Intel PCH HDMI/DP,pcm=9 event17
• HDA Intel PCH HDMI/DP,pcm=8 event16
• HDA Intel PCH HDMI/DP,pcm=7 event15
• HDA Intel PCH HDMI/DP,pcm=3 event14
• HDA Intel PCH Headphone event13
• HDA Intel PCH Mic event12
• DP-2 event11
• Video Bus event10
• ITE8708 CIR transceiver event9
• SG.Ltd SG Control Mic event4
• SG.Ltd SG Control Mic Keyboard event3
• Power Button event2
• Power Button event1
• Sleep Button event0

In my case, the remote control I want is named SG.Ltd SG Control Mic Keyboard located in the path /dev/input/event3. We could use the path directly in the script, but since the device path might change if you add or remove hardvare or unpair and repair a device, it's safer to use the device name.

2 Edit the config.yaml file

Copy the name to the devices list in the /bt_remote_docker/config.yaml file and edit all other relevant entries in the config file.

3 Build the docker container

Make sure the build.sh and run.sh scripts are executable by sudo chmod +x build.sh && sudo chmod +x run.sh Now build the container with ./build.sh

4 Edit the path to your config.yaml file

Edit the run.sh file and change the line -v /home/dev/py/bt_remote:/config \ change /home/dev/py/bt_remote to the local path where you store the config.yaml file.

5 Run the container

Now run the container with ./run.sh

6 View the events in Home Asssistant

Open developer tools in HA and go to events. In the "event to subscribe to" field, enter the event_namefrom your edited config.yaml file, default is mi_bt_remote, and press the "Start listening" button. You should now see the incoming events when a remote button is pressed, released or held, indicated as down, up and hold respectively in the event payload.