Raspberry Pi CEC server add-on

Starting from HomeAssistant 2021.7.0, the CEC libraries included in HomeAssistant do no longer support CEC interfaces that are not included in the Linux kernel itself. Therefore, it is no longer possible to control the HDMI-CEC bus through the hdmi-cec integration alone.

However, the hdmi-cec integration supports talking to an HDMI-CEC device over a TCP socket. This add-on launches a HDMI-CEC server which supports the Raspberry Pi hardware interface.

Installation

Please refer to Installing 3rd Party Addons and add my parent repository for this repo

Configuration

After enabling this add-on and configuring it to automatically start, one can use the following in HomeAssistant configuration.yaml:

hdmi_cec:
  host: ffa7b53e-pi-cec

and restart HomeAssistant. You should then be able to control your HDMI-CEC devices with the integration commands.

Notes

For the curious, ffa7b53e is the SHA-1 hash of the string https://github.com/barneyman/ha-addons and is computed from the repository name by HomeAssistant.

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RPI GPU Memory

The libraries that pycec uses require there be 128M of memory allocatd to the GPU - if you see any strange assertions in the logs, use raspi-config to change that value.

Using the docker file as a remote

If you want to use just the dockerfile, ie not as an HA add-on, on a remote HDMI, follow this (it's RPI specific but adapt as required)

• Burn a lite version of Buster, using the Raspberry Imager
  • Give it a sensible name, wifi creds & enable SSH
• SSH to it
• update it
  • sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade && sudo apt install git
• install docker
  • curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh && sudo sh get-docker.sh
• add yourself to the docker group
  • sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
• Log out, log in (for the OS to re-eval your new group membership)
• Clone my fork (specifically for my 'helper' shell scripts)
  • git clone https://github.com/barneyman/homeassistant-addon-pi-cec.git && cd homeassistant-addon-pi-cec
• build the docker image - this will take the time it takes to make and a drink a cup of tea
  • sh ./build.sh
• disable DRM VC4 V3D driver in /boot/config.txt (pycec needs tvservice which this driver disables)
  • sudo nano /boot/config.txt - find Enable DRM VC4 V3D driver and comment out that section
• while in that file, turn off the 'rpi switches TV input when it reboots' by adding hdmi_ignore_cec_init=1
• reboot
• log back in, cd homeassistant-addon-pi-cec
• run the test - you may see a few deprecation warnings but no assertions or strange behaviour
  • sh ./runtest.sh
• edit your configuration.yaml
  • add an hdmi_cec section with a host entry (details in my repo Readme.md, the host is your rpi hostname)
• restart your HA
• you should now have a bunch of switch.hdmi_? entities
• when you're happy that's worked, kill the runtest.sh above execute run.sh which will make it persistent across boots
  • beware! HA will vomit errors when pycec disappears, another reboot of HA won't hurt