CEC research
Published on 14 January 2015
Why?
Talking about dumb TVs and how you could use a tiny computer connected to an HDMI port to make your TV smarter. If it supports HDMI CEC then your TV remote could be used to control the smartbox.
A random dump of HDMI CEC stuff I could find.
CEC on the Pi
Initial blog post about CEC on Pi.
libCEC seems to be the thing that enables this support. They made an HDMI-USB box that bridges your PC media centre and TV but it also works directly on the Pi with no other hardware. Raspbmc uses libCEC.
Someone’s written a daemon that bridges libCEC with uinput which might be useful rather than have each application have to bind to libcec.
A tutorial for installing libCEC on the Pi. The cec-client seems to allow you to discover and send commands to a TV. I guess you might be able to read commands from the TV/remote too?
Pairing
There’s an initial pairing process to get it work with TVs. I found this with my 6 year old Sony Bravia.
Also, I found that cheaper (from the £ shop) HDMI cables won’t work since they might not have the data wire in the cable. A slightly more expensive Amazon Basics cable did work.
A Node-RED flow for turning off TV when a phone leaves a wifi network.