Remote Control

Control the Zenith Z42P3/Z50P3 Television via Serial

Background

I recently discovered that the manual for my television set has a reference to using the serial port as an "external control device". Everything the remote control can do can be done via the serial port, which opens up some interesting automation possibilities.

C Dependencies

You need ZeroMQ libs, the Protobuf C compiler, and Python dev files to compile the tv-serial executable

apt install libzmq3-dev protobuf-c-compiler python-dev

Python Dependencies

You need the python ZeroMQ and the Protobuf python library and compiler to run the tv-client.py script

apt install protobuf-compiler
pip install pyzmq
pip install protobuf

Building

Assuming you have all dependencies installed, it should be as easy as:

make

License

This source code is shared under the GNU Affero General Public License, v3.0.