Media center controller with a numpad keyboard

Project goals

To have a device managing bunch of connected electronics (soundbar, turntable, preamp, printer, etc) from a physical mini keyboard:

1. Turn on/off printer
2. Turn on/off soundbar + turntable
3. Turn on/off soundbar + select mode for movie watching or music streaming

Hardware

1. Raspberry Pi 2B
2. Relays controller with 4 relays
3. YSP-4000 soundbar (see ysp-4000 repo)
4. Dell 1700 printer (CUPS + Lexmark E234 PPD)
5. Turntable and preamp

Keyboard setup

Inspired by this blog post

cat /proc/bus/input/devices

Take vendor id and product id and created udev rule

sudo bash -c 'cat > /etc/udev/rules.d/KeyPad.rules << EOF
ATTRS{idVendor}=="04b4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="06b0", SYMLINK+="input/keypad"
EOF'

sudo udevadm control --reload

Now the keyboard can be opened as /dev/input/keypad device:

keypad = InputDevice('/dev/input/keypad')

Relays and RPi

See the wiring diagram

Installation instructions

Build

python3 -m build

Install

On the device

pip3 install --upgrade --user git+https://github.com/pzbitskiy/media_center_kb

# test
mediackb -v

Create systemd service

sudo bash -c 'cat > /etc/systemd/system/media-center-kb.service <<EOF
[Unit]
Description=Media center keyboard daemon

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

[Service]
User=pi
ExecStart=mediackb
Type=idle
RemainAfterExit=no
Restart=on-failure
EOF'

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start media-center-kb
sudo systemctl enable media-center-kb

Ensure it is running

sudo systemctl --type=service --state=running