It is surprisingly hard to find a device that can dump details about the various protocols and negotiated standards for a HDMI connection. For how ubiquitous HDMI is, you’d think that there would be a lot of devices that can do this. There are LOADS of devices that can snoop USB and Ethernet, but HDMI is a bit of a different beast, apparently.
After a bit of searching, I found the Altinex TE460-137 could do exactly what I wanted.
Single’s Day is a big deal in China and AliExpress has a big sale in celebration.
In addition to project supplies, I found quite a few items that can only be classified as “ohh, that looks interesting and I need another $11 in the cart to unlock free shipping…” items.
I was planing on doing a series of posts covering some of the stuff I bought but nothing on it’s own was really “worth” a full post so instead of a bunch of short “Two Minute Teardown” posts, I decided to just roll everything into this massive post.
To make a long store short, Google recently pushed a few updates to my TV that made it slow as all hell and frustratingly unusable. I finally got fed up with the laggy UI and dug out an old mini PC and installed LibreELEC on it.
Everything worked perfectly except for the lack of CEC support on the mini PC.
This is a common enough problem that there’s a few different devices out there that can add CEC support to a device that doesn’t have it. I chose the Pulse-Eight HDMI CEC Injector because it’s natively supported by LibreELEC.
It’s hard to beat Sonoff switches when it comes to well-made, affordable, Home Assistant compatible switches. Ever since they announced the T5 series, I’ve been patiently waiting for the US variant to become available so I could replace my M5 switches with T5 switches.
Don’t get me wrong, the M5 switches are great… but not perfect.
The T5 switches improve on the M5 limitations with some new and novel hardware features. Taking advantage of these unique features requires a considerably more complex ESPHome configuration than the M5 series switches.
Monitor-top light bars are wonderful for reducing eye strain and fatigue and the effect is even better with a bias light behind the monitor. Enter the Yeelight Light Bar Pro (YLTD003).
YeeLight marketing photo from AliExpress listing. The background wash light really does help reduce eye strain and fatigue.
