I’ve always been a fan of how technology can seamlessly integrate into our daily lives, making things just a bit more convenient without us even noticing. That’s why I decided to set up a family digital calendar on a Raspberry Pi 4, mounted on our kitchen wall. It’s been a great addition—always on, always up-to-date, and a central hub for our family schedule. However, there was one minor inconvenience: after a few minutes of inactivity, the screen would go black, requiring a manual button press to wake it up. Not the end of the world, but I thought, why not make it even smarter?
I already have a SONOFF SNZB-06P presence detector set up in the kitchen for some lighting automation, so I wondered if I could leverage that to wake up the Raspberry Pi screen when someone enters the room. The idea was simple: when the presence detector detects motion, send a signal to the Pi to wake up the screen. But how?
After some research, I discovered that while there isn’t a direct HA integration for waking up a Raspberry Pi screen, there are workarounds. I decided to use a combination of HA automations and a simple Python script running on the Pi itself. Here’s how it works:
- Presence Detection: The SONOFF SNZB-06P sends a signal to HA when motion is detected.
- HA Automation: I set up an automation in HA that triggers when motion is detected. This automation sends a command to a custom script on the Pi.
- Python Script: The script, running on the Pi, uses the
wakeonlanlibrary to send a wake-up signal to the Pi’s own network interface, effectively waking up the screen.
It’s been working flawlessly for a few weeks now! No more manual button presses, just seamless integration with our daily routine. I’m even thinking of taking it a step further by integrating voice commands to manually wake up the screen if needed.
If anyone has similar setups or additional tips on optimizing this, I’d love to hear about them! It’s amazing how a little tweak can make such a difference in our smart home experience.