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Some of us only switch phones when our old phone has outlived its usefulness, but most people like to upgrade every now and then for a better camera, performance, or some other new feature. But when you do, you have to answer your question what to do with your old phone. Are you just trading? Throw it away and contribute to e-waste?
Another (and potentially better) option is to set it to do something else, like turn the remote for all the devices in your smart home. Yes, it’s possible, and it’s all thanks to Home Assistant.
Home Assistant brings your devices together
Ecosystem barriers don’t matter
Whether it’s Apple HomeKit, Google Home, or Amazon Alexa, it would be great if every smart home device played well with a particular ecosystem. But most devices want to have an internet connection and use their own ecosystem, which is possible usually support some of these options and it’s a mess. These things need multiple apps and accounts to work properly.
Fortunately, Home Assistant can fix almost all of that and elevate your smart home experience even further. My smart home is a bit basic and we only have a few devices, but they are also devices that I never expected to be able to be used under one interface, and Home Assistant makes it possible.
I can control both my LIFX and Xiaomi light bulbs, control playback on my Google Cast-enabled devices, control my LG TVs with the remote, and even see the ink levels on my printer, which I didn’t expect considering it’s a 2014 model. All this is combined under one interface, and it is beautiful.
So where does your phone come into play?
Turn your phone into a remote control
Creating a personal dashboard
Of course, Home Assistant has a smartphone app you can use to control your home, but if you want to turn your phone into a remote control, you might want to do a little more than the basics. First, it’s probably worth setting Home Assistant as the default “launcher” so it’s the first thing you see when you unlock the phone (on that note, it might also be useful to remove any unlocking methods from the phone). Home Assistant isn’t listed as a launcher by default, but you can enable it by going into the app’s settings and then replace your home launcher with it.
Next, it’s a good idea to design a dashboard specifically for use with your phone. To be honest, even though I’ve had Home Assistant for over a year now, I’ve never configured a nice dashboard for it, and that’s put me off using it more. But this time I created a new dashboard and set it up correctly with all my devices.
At the top of my dashboard I put two smart lights that are currently in the house. Even though they’re from different brands, you wouldn’t know it by looking at the cards here, and that’s really cool. In fact, they also have different features, as only one supports RGB, but this becomes clear when I long-press on them to see more information. One thing you need to pay attention to is what kind of cards you add. There are special light cards that incorporate the brightness control directly into the dashboard, but there are also button cards that only turn the lights on or off.
For my TVs, I have a simply named integration from the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS). LG WebOS Remote Controland that’s exactly what it says. Since these are smart TVs, they are connected to the internet and I can fully control them here. In some ways it’s faster than using my actual remote, as using the TV’s UI is usually quite slow. These cards allow me to open programs or select an HDMI input without waiting for the TV menu to open, so that’s great.
I also plan to add a Chromecast TV remote to the dashboard for my Chromecast-enabled living room TV. This makes it easy to control both the TV and Chromecast with a single device without having to juggle a remote. You can do with this Android TV Remote integration For Home Assistant, but you can also use it if you don’t want to set everything up manually Chromecast Google TV Remote integration To automatically set up a remote from HACS that looks like a physical remote with function buttons.
Finally, I’ve added a section for media controls so I can see what’s playing on my smart speakers, displays, and TVs with Google Cast and easily play/pause.
You can be even more inventive
Home Assistant goes deeper
All of this is already great, but as I mentioned, my setup is fairly simple. Depending on how many devices you have and what kind of workflow you need, you can definitely do more with your smart home.
The most I went for myself was to create a way to stream YouTube videos to devices like Chromecast or Nest Hub. Google Cast integration allows you to do this by creating a script, but you may think that you need to create a special script for each video first, because the media ID to be cast must be specified in the script.
Thankfully, with the help of my colleague Adam Conway, I created a text helper in my dashboard that allowed me to enter a YouTube URL, then modified the example script to use RegEx to parse the media ID from that URL. Now I can just copy the YouTube URL and play it on my TV or Nest Hub using my phone and Home Assistant. Of course if you do it this way you need a way to access the YouTube app or website to grab the link, but it’s more useful on my main phone than a dedicated smart remote like this anyway.
Home Assistant wins everywhere
Replacing your old phone as a remote control for your smart home is just one of the benefits of using Home Assistant. As I already touched on, it’s amazing how it gathers all your smart devices under one ecosystem and makes them easily manageable, as well as reducing your dependence on cloud services that manufacturers want you to use. Plus, since the Home Assistant server doesn’t require powerful hardware, it’s also a great way to replace an old computer.
- OS
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Windows, macOS, Linux
- Compatible with iOS
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Yes
- Compatible with Android
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Yes
