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Someone I care about has dementia. They love television. Sky Q, as a box, requires you to press channel number buttons quickly enough that the system registers each one before it gives up and goes back to whatever it was already showing. For someone with dementia, that is not a reasonable thing to ask. My response to this was not to phone Sky. It was to build a Home Assistant automation so that pressing one button on a tablet screen changes the channel to exactly that channel. One press. Done.
This page covers the foundation of the project — the hardware and software groundwork before any of the actual automation begins. Almost everything here can be substituted, scaled down or replaced entirely. This is my specific build, assembled with my own budget and the knowledge that the equipment would eventually be coming home with me. I will be clear about where the spec can reasonably be reduced, and where it really should not be.
At the heart of it all is a Raspberry Pi — a credit-card-sized single-board computer that runs from a microSD card and has spawned an entire ecosystem of accessories, integrations and hobbyists who genuinely should know better by now. I am firmly in that last category.
If Sky Q is not your problem and you have just stumbled here, the rest of the site covers what else Home Assistant can do — a selection of projects that the Good Lady Wife has filed somewhere between “tolerable” and “do you know what time it is”.