FOSSifying my home | Project One: Media Center (Planning)

Imagine, if you will, going to the relatively new household of someone you know. Some people want to watch TV, so your friend or relative pulls out a couple remotes. With one, they turn on an old TV and ensure its input is on a specific HDMI option. With the second remote, which is wider than you would expect it to be but still looks like a remote, they control what's going on on the screen, navigating to a file system or streaming service.

But they have to search for a specific file or show or something. You recall this as the most frustrating part of watching something on TV: pressing the arrow buttons or something to follow whatever on-screen keyboard the service uses. To your surprise, though, this isn't what the person does. Instead, they simply flip over their weird remote, unfold it into a keyboard, and start typing.

Perhaps later you want to watch something advertised in their shelf of watchable media. You select what looks to be a DVD case, only to find a couple SD cards or some sort of USB storage device. The user simply plugs it in to a device under their TV and brings it up with the remote.

A more concise, and the most important, feature: imagine a smart-TV that doesn't send any tracking data back to companies, that doesn't refuse to show you a bunch of shows because of your location, and that won't show you any ads unless you decide to watch something on a platform that sometimes evades ad blockers.

My plan involved the following:

• Install a media-center Linux distro onto an old laptop that barely works: hopefully this will help with issues the laptop was having (I'm not using the one with the broken GPU lol), especially since one of the aspects that makes some of our old laptops unusable is that they have to be plugged in all the time because their battery sucks. Whether or not it can hold a charge is kinda irrelevant if it's stationary! Although I might want to do some sort of test of the power draw.
• Create a Bluetooth remote for the laptop that uses keyboard signals to control the new "smart TV" as a remote would control a normal one. I had planned to, whenever I can afford it, buy the parts to do this with the Teensy micro-controller I bought in a manic episode years ago. This would involve at the very least keys, some sort of chassis, a Bluetooth module, and potentially a PCB--not much of a splurge considering the PCB would cost a lot less than the Bluetooth.

But then, my spouse started going through the boxes of stuff that they had at their house from middle school and up and giving me all the old devices they had that they never really use, in hopes that I could find anything fun to mess around with or hack. And among those devices was this more-recently-purchased gem:

 This potentially raises a cheaper and cooler option for the computer's "remote:" repurpose this keyboard into one. It can still open up to a normal keyboard, but when folded up it could just be a remote. If I use buttons with more resistance, then the keyboard should still be usable if, for example, we needed to put in a password. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much cheaper this option would end up being, because it depends on if I'm able to piggy back off of the keyboard's existing Bluetooth module. Hopefully I can somehow hook up the keys of the new macropad on its back to the microprocessor of this keyboard, so that they send signals the same way as the existing keys would. This will require me to get better at electronics and hardware hacking first, but I think as an eventual goal it sounds cool. For now, we can just use this as a keyboard instead of a remote.