About a month ago, I found a decent deal on a refurbished BenQ projector and decided it was finally time to put something more interesting than a blank wall in front of my couch. I’d naively hoped the projector would support HDMI-CEC and allow my Chromecast (and thus my nearby smart speaker) to control its power state and input. Unfortunately, as with most projectors, this 1-year-old projector still doesn’t support the now 16-year-old protocol, and so I resigned myself to use its remote like a regular human.
Naturally, with literal seconds of effort per day wasted manually pressing the power button, it only took me a week to decide that I’d need to build my own solution.