bleak

Change the aura of the room with your smart TV!

What is this??

This came from an idea in high school where one could change a channel and some LEDs could change color. This project is just that, only with Smart TV's (Roku TV's and Roku devices supported). One changes the application to Netflix, the LEDs turn red. Another changes the application to Hulu, the LEDs turn green.

How does it work?

bleak sends out a API request to your Roku TV/Roku device you specify in a JSON file, which is read by bleak, and based on that response, the LEDs will change color. These requests happen at one second intervals.

TL;DR

Read the source code.

Pre req's

A Raspberry Pi (tested with a Raspberry Pi 4)
A WS2818B LED strip
Rust 1.40+ (this is the version of Rust bleak was written in) However, any version of Rust 2018 will most likely be fine

Installation

Hardware

Coming soon!

Software

Download and install Rust. You can find Rust here or just use curl to install Rust via rustup (recommended):

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/wymillerlinux/bleak

Asssuming one is a command line wizard, you have navigated to the root of the project.

Compilation/Use

There's two ways of compiling this project. One way is to compile on Rasberry Pi itself, which is a bit slow. The other way is some cross-compilation hoodoo voodoo magic which I have not explored as of yet. Once I figure out to use cross-compliation effectively, I will update this readme.

Next, run cargo to compile it (I happened to compile this on the Raspberry Pi itself):

cargo build --release && cp ./target/release/bleak ~/.cargo/bin && bleak

or you can:

cargo run

to run this program as one is hacking away.

I wrote a systmed service file so starting and stopping would be like I'm starting and stopping any service on a Linux machine. I also didn't like bleak taking control of my terminal session :)

Troubleshooting

Things that I've noticed:

bleak will fail from time to time when grabbing responses. There's no error handling at this point.
bleak like to change color to some random color(s) when being told to change color to, say, green or red.
Roku TV's tend to be slow while bleak is running. Can't reproduce this problem, however...

Smart TV support

In development:

Roku devices and Roku TV's

Future possibilities:

Samsung SmartThings TV
Android TV
Amazon's Fire TV

Contribution

I'd love some contributors! Submit a PR and email me for some more information!

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