Control IR Devices with Home Assistant EASILY - Broadlink RM Pro

this little guy right here has got to be one of the most complained about devices that i see people having problems with when it comes to integrating it with home assistant this little black box and for good reason too he's a tricky little bag hey guys and welcome back to another tech tutorial tuesday and today we're going to be taking a look at this little troublemaker this is the broadlink rm4 pro and what this does is allow you to control your infrared and rf devices all through this one little black box and that is useful for number one so that you don't need to have multiple remotes sitting around but number two so that you can manage them smartly smartly is that a word it is now but typically devices that use infrared or rf aren't all that smart so this can help you to control your devices via your phone or smart home platform that otherwise wouldn't be possible some devices that you may have that use infrared are typically things like tv remotes air conditioning remotes blu-ray players sound systems basically anything that has a remote something like this could also help you to do a more complicated sequence of events for example many of you may already have a smart tv that you can control the power remotely through home assistant but this could help you to do a far more complicated series of events for example say you wanted to power on the tv press the home button scroll over left three times hit enter hit enter again then turn the volume up four times then you could do that kind of thing with the broad link rm4 pro but typically in the past this has been a source of confusion for a lot of people and i can definitely see why kind of see i don't really have any old bits of tech that use infrared anymore sure i definitely have tvs but all of them can be powered and volume controlled natively via home assistant integrations and i rarely need to change the source on these tvs and so i've never had the need for a broad length before but these were super cheap on prime day the other day and i see enough people struggling with this that i thought i'd try and give it my own take um but the reason i can kind of see where the confusion is is that there have been some ui improvements to home assistant in literally the last couple of versions and i think this possibly makes this process a lot easier to integrate the broad link r throw but i can definitely see why it might have been annoying previously it's worth mentioning that while i am using the rm4 pro for this you can also use the rm4 mini and follow this exact same procedure so first things first you're going to need to have your broad link already set up and configured within the broadlink app this is a pretty straightforward process and it should just take a couple of minutes to do once you've done that you need to unlock the device by heading to the three dots in the top right hand corner scrolling down and making sure that the lock device option is turned off if this is a brand new broadlink device i wouldn't spend any time configuring devices inside of the app unless of course you want to use the broadlink app as well but i wouldn't spend any time creating the codes inside the broadlink app since these won't be copied into home assistant next head over into home assistant and if you have a good network then you should have a notification saying that a new device was discovered and you should be able to auto magically add the broad link integration from there if you don't get that notification then try restarting home assistant to see if it pops up and if it doesn't then you can simply add it manually by pressing the add button in the bottom right hand corner searching for broadlink and selecting the broad link integration you need to enter the ip address or host name for your broadlink device by checking your router's webpage unfortunately broadlink do not give you this information inside their app once you've added the broadlink integration you'll see that you now have a new device and also a new remote entity that is the first step in the process and now we can learn the codes the way that infrared and rf works is that the remote transmits a unique code for each button press which is picked up by your tv and so we need to teach the broad link these codes so that it can replicate the button presses now come in close come here that's it getting close this process sucks i'm not going to sugarcoat it if you have a lot of buttons you want to teach it sucks so let's teach our first button press and this process works for infrared buttons as well as rf buttons the process is the exact same head over to services and then in the drop down choose remote dot learn command if you aren't seeing the same screen as i am here and yours looks a little bit different then hit this little button here to switch to ui mode now from here we're going to have a couple of options and we're going to go through all of them firstly you will want to select your entity which will be our newly created remote then under that we have the device field and we have the command field the device field is where you would specify the device you want to be controlled and this can be any name that you want and the command field is the specific button you want for that device again this can be any name that you give it the thing with the device field is is that you can keep reusing the same device name as long as the command name is different so in this example i want to control my office tv so in the device name i'm going to enter office underscore tv and then in the command i enter power because the first one i'm going to learn is the power button on my remote in other words the device name is kind of like a group name for all of your commands so you're grouping all of the commands under the device name hopefully that makes sense then under that we have three more options we have command type alternative and timeout command type is where you would select infrared or rf in my case it's infrared and then alternative allows you to have alternating buttons for a single function so some remotes will send a different code for the same button for example the power button might send a code for power on and a different code for power off that is where you might want to use the alternate button my remote doesn't have that so i'm going to go ahead and leave that off and then finally the timeout is how long the broad link will enter learning mode before exiting if it doesn't learn a code go ahead and hit the call service button and you'll notice the led on the front of the broad link will turn orange this means that it's entered learning mode and you can now point your remote at the broadlink and press the button that you want to learn at which point the led will turn off again and that is it that is our first code learned if the led goes off then the command has now been successfully learned and you can go ahead and repeat the process for all the buttons you want the nice thing is is that if you're learning lots of buttons all from a single remote for example a tv remote then all you need to do is change the command name the rest can just be left so whilst it is a tedious process it does make learning commands fairly quick because it's just one field to be changed once you've finished learning commands we can now give them a test out so in the drop down change from learn command to send command and then enter the device name and command name the exact same as before the three new options we now have are pretty self-explanatory but basically they allow you to repeat commands this could be useful for example if you wanted to press the volume up button four times hit the call service button and then you should see your device being controlled and you know your code is working all right so that is all well and good but obviously we don't want to have to manually type out a service every time we want to control a device that would be pretty impractical so how do we actually turn this into a button there is a few different methods you could do here you could create a template switch but since the majority of devices that you'll be dealing with will have no feedback i personally prefer to go with a script instead since you can actually add script buttons or scripts as buttons in your lovelace dashboard head over to scripts and then create a new script and we're going to call this office tv power on and basically all we need to do is the exact same as what we just did earlier by calling a service and then adding the remote dot send command to that service and then entering your device name and command name the exact same as before of course because this is a script you could add a whole entire sequence of events to this one script and then have that all saved as a single button if you wanted to hit the save button on your script and then head over to lovelace and you can add a new button and select your script from the drop down hit save and you are done you've now added your broad link device or broadlink button press to your lovelace dashboard at this point you're probably thinking that's cool and all for one single button press but i've just taught my broad link 50 codes how the heck am i meant to remember the name that i gave to all of them i'm glad you asked all of the codes are stored inside the storage folder which is inside your config folder and you can access this via the file editor or samba share and you can also do it inside visual studio code but it is a little bit more annoying first go to the file editor add-on and then into configuration and under the ignored list remove the storage line then head over to file editor and in the top left hand corner click the browse file system button and then click the dot storage folder and inside there you will have a file that starts with broad link now with the new process of doing things inside of the home assistant ui i haven't actually found a need for having the codes or have a need to use the codes but if you did need to use them or you did need to find them then at least you know where you can access them inside this file you will also find a list of all of the device names that you entered earlier plus their respective commands under that device name this helps if you need to refer to them later if you can't remember them after literally a few moments of teaching commands to the broadlink and adding them to my script you can come up with a far more advanced sequence just like this one and there we go that is how to add the broad link integration to your home assistant how to learn some codes and then also how to add buttons to your love list by utilizing scripts and obviously you can repeat that process for as many devices as you want to learn and as many buttons as you want to add to your lovelace unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way of pulling out existing codes that you've already learned from the broadlink app that would be a really nice addition if there was some sort of way but i haven't found any way yet but anyways that's gonna about do it for this video hopefully you guys find it useful let me know in the comments down below if you are using a broad link i know a lot of people are and obviously there's a lot of confusion around the broad link integration so i'm interested to know how many guys uh or how many of you guys are using the broad link uh platform do let me know in the comments down below if you want support this channel you can do so by becoming a patron on patreon and your support allows me to keep on making these videos thank you to all my current patreon supporters as always your support is very much appreciated make sure to drop this video a like and get subscribed and i will see you in the next video show

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 16,255

Rating: 4.9513888 out of 5

Keywords: home assistant broadlink, home assistant, broadlink, smart home, home automation, home assistant ir, home assistant infrared, home assistant rf, home assistant broadlink rm4 pro, home assistant broadlink rm pro, home assistant broadlink integration, home assistant control ir, home assistant control rf, control ir devices, smart home ir, smart home broadlink, broadlink smart home, broadlink home assistant

Id: jEOyTGaKwaQ

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 06 2021