For years I treated HDMI-CEC like a house spirit: sometimes helpful, mostly temperamental, never fully understood. My living-room stack is straightforward: Samsung TV on ARC (NOT eARC - story for another day), Denon AVR-X1700H hidden in a closet, Apple TV plus a bunch of consoles connected to the receiver, and a Raspberry Pi 4 already doing Homebridge duty. When it comes to CEC, the Apple TV handles it like a dream, but every console behaves like it missed the last week of CEC school. They wake the TV, switch the input, then leave the Denon asleep so I’m back to toggling audio outputs manually.

Steps I took

1. Go to the homebridge terminal, you can SSH or I just used the homebridge UI.

2. Install Playactor sudo npm install -g playactor.

3. Run playactor browse and find your PS5, remember its name like “PS5-XXX”, you’ll need it later.

4. Run playactor login --host-name PS5-XXX --no-open-urls to register your device as a remote play controller. The --no-open-urls is important here because by default it tries to open a browser which isn’t gonna work if you’re using SSH or homebridge UI.

Since moving to Seattle I have been gradually automating an ordinary apartment. The goal is not to build a trade-show demo; it is to make the lights, TV, door, and vacuum respond consistently. Online discussions often highlight the worst connected gadgets, but with some patience (and a few hubs) the living room can anticipate daily routines instead of fighting them.

Where we are and how we got here

The automation itch started in the laziest way possible: I was already under the blanket and wished the lamp would turn off by itself. That nudge toward Philips Hue led to HomeKit, which led to buying a Raspberry Pi at 1 a.m. because I could not believe there was no native way to control the TV. Once one subsystem cooperated, every other annoyance turned into a candidate for automation. The snapshot below shows the apartment as it stands today.

Update June 2021: people felt the methods in this post are too extreme. Fortunately, ASUS has since published a new support article on this topic, and I’ve heard that it works better. I haven’t tried it myself since I changed to eero (which works perfect with HomeKit) more than a year ago. Original post below.

I’ve had pretty good experiences with HomeKit with Philips Hue and Lutron Caseta. However, I noticed that standalone devices (ones that don’t have hubs) would often show “No Response” in HomeKit. This post shows some things that I learned trying to get all my devices to be reliable.

Homebridge is a key part to my home automation setup. I run it on a Raspberry Pi (gen 1, pictured in header) and it allows me to integrate my TV, Apple TV, and robot vacuum into HomeKit. However, it does crash quite a bit. Here are some things I did to make Homebridge easier to deal with.