I built a WAY better Smart TV Remote!

I couldn't find the perfect TV remote, so I built my own. And this thing is packed full of features and automations, and the best part is, it cost me nothing to make this. It only took me about 20 minutes, and I made the entire thing while sitting right here on the couch, and I only used my phone to make this remote. And I did it all while watching TV. Seriously, anyone can make this. So this all started because I switched from an iPhone to an Android phone, and we use an Apple TV here in our family room, and there doesn't seem to be any good options to control the Apple TV with an Android phone. So I thought, maybe I'll just use the Apple TV remote to change the channel and volume and all that kind of stuff, but this is way less convenient. First of all, you have to find it from wherever the kids put it last, or if I'm in the kitchen, I can't just quickly pull out my phone and change the volume or channel or whatever, and I got really used to doing that on my iPhone with the Apple TV. So then I realized, I'm just gonna have to make the remote myself. And you can use any device for this, any Android phone, iPhone, iPad, and I'm using the Pixel Fold, and what's awesome about this use case is I can use the outside screen for the remote, or if I need more buttons, I can just open it up, and it's basically the tablet view of this remote with all the buttons right there in my pocket at all times. It's pretty sweet. When I started building this remote, I first wanted the same functionality as the iPhone to control the Apple TV to be on this phone. So being able to turn on the TV, so I just press the button to turn it on, and then I also have the little remote buttons for the arrows so I can go around and I can select something. You can play, skip. It works like a normal remote. And I'll explain in a minute how I added these buttons, and you'll see it's pretty simple. But then I was like, hmm, using the little arrows to go and select a different app each time, it's kind of slow. There's probably a better way. I mean, I can create any button I want, so why not have one jump straight into a TV app? Look how well it works. If I wanna go to YouTube TV, or HBO Max, or Netflix, or YouTube, and it goes to it so fast. It's way faster than selecting it, and this already has made it so much better than the Apple TV remote. What else could I add? Well, one issue I always run into is when the kids are out here, they're extremely loud. I don't know what it is. Maybe they want me to pay attention to them or something. I don't know. But when they're really loud and I miss something on the TV, I can just press a button and it'll jump back 30 seconds. So if I did miss something, I don't have to get mad at them. I can just press that button. And then I was like, what if I took it the other way and used it to skip commercials? I don't know if you saw the tour I did at David's house. He had a custom remote that he built, and he could press a button and it would skip certain amount of times ahead to skip commercials. That's such a great idea. I'm just gonna add that to the remote. So when I realize it's getting close to the commercial, I can just press the skip commercial button and it will skip the right amount of times that a normal commercial is. And then it stops. Now wait, this one's a little short. I can just press forward a couple more times and boom. I'm already there. So it's so much faster at skipping commercials when you've recorded TV like I do on YouTube TV. I don't have to press it like 15 or 16 times, which is super annoying to do. This makes it so much easier. Another thing I wanna be able to do is manually change the lights. So I have some buttons on here to dim the lights, turn them off, turn them back on bright. And it's nice to have these buttons right here, but you might've seen that the lights will actually automatically change with our TV. If it's playing a movie on Netflix, all the lights will turn off at night, or if the movie is paused, the lights will turn to a dim setting. And that's been super convenient to use, but every once in a while, we don't want that automation to run like for pausing in a bunch or if there's people over. So I added another button on the remote to disable that automation. That way the automation doesn't get annoying and it keeps a high spouse approval factor. Then that got me thinking, how could I make Allie even happier with an automation? When we're putting kids down, if you're a parent, you know this. It can take a while. Like it could take a full hour trying to tuck them in, tell them stories, all that good stuff. Come on, $2 if you stay in bed. Make it five and it's a deal. And then when you come out here and you turn on a show, they come out and see you watching TV. That could start that whole process over again or make it so they don't wanna go to bed. Yeah, it's terrible. I hate when that happens. And so I made an automation that makes it so the kids never see us watching TV out here. There are a few motion sensors in the hallway where the bedrooms are. And if the kids get out of bed at night and we're watching TV out here, the TV will automatically pause and turn off. And that way when the kids walk out here, we're not watching TV and it's so much easier to walk them back to bed. Allie loves this automation. It works so well. But there is some times where we don't want this automation to run. So there is a button right on the remote to override it as well. So no matter what, the automation does exactly what we want and we love it. So you might be like, all right, Reed, how did you make all of this happen? Well, I'm using Home Assistant and Home Assistant is free and open source so anyone can have access to it. And I have my Apple TV integrated into Home Assistant. That's how I'm able to control it. You don't have to use the Apple TV though. There are a lot of other options you can use with Home Assistant, but I like the Apple TV because it integrates extremely well and it's so fast. As fast as I can press the buttons on my phone to control the Apple TV is just as fast as using the Apple TV remote. To make this, you'll just need to create a customized dashboard by creating a new view and then select sections. That will be the drag and drop option. If you don't do that, you'll have to do a little more coding and it will be a little more difficult, so select sections and it'll be much easier. When it comes time to adding the buttons, it's pretty simple. You just create a card and a card can be a button or I'm choosing tile. And the reason I'm using that is because I can change the color of the different icons and it just looks a little more clean, but you can use whatever you want. So I choose tile and then for the interaction, I'm gonna choose remote send command. And what this will do is send a command to whatever device that you wanna use. So for the entity, I'm gonna choose the Apple TV here in my family room. And for the command, I'm gonna put left, right, or whatever command I want. There's a whole list online that you can choose from. It's pretty self-explanatory and you just paste that in and then you save it and now you have a button that will control the Apple TV or whatever device you want. And then it's really easy to make more of them because you can just copy and paste that button and then just slightly tweak it. So you can just change the command to right and change it to a right arrow and then just keep doing that for all the buttons that you want. With Home Assistant now, you can drag and drop all the buttons. It's really easy to use and that's how I was able to do it right here on the couch just using my phone because it's a lot of just dragging and dropping. There's not a whole lot of typing or pretty much no coding at all, so anyone can do this. I'm using the Pixel 9 Pro Fold and I love this thing. The screen is massive and it makes working on Home Assistant so much easier because I can see everything. And yeah, that's how I was able to do everything right here on the couch and not have to go get my computer. So I'm excited to explore more smart home topics and different things using a foldable phone. Again, you can use any phone or tablet you want for this project. So yeah, I used an iPhone for two years and then switching back to an Android phone has definitely shaken things up in my smart home. It's been a little challenging to get it all working with an Android phone, but it's been a really good challenge because I've been doing projects like this, which have made things way better and it's been so much fun. Thanks for watching. Wait, wasn't the TV just on? What? No, the TV's off. Hmm, okay.