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.

I rely on TinyPilot to manage a Windows PC that lives in a closet. TinyPilot is a Raspberry Pi-based KVM: it streams HDMI video from the PC and pretends to be a USB keyboard and mouse so I can type over the network. My PC also sleeps aggressively to save power. A real keyboard wakes it. TinyPilot did not, so every remote session began with a trip to the closet. Wake-on-LAN was unreliable on that motherboard, so I decided to make TinyPilot behave like a normal USB keyboard during suspend.

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.