Ok, let's be honest. The Adafruit MacroPad is just awesome! But it could be better if you could control things over the Internet or local network. Fear not, for there is a way. With the magic of Remote Procedure Calls, you can have your computer to do all of the networking stuff and return the results by telling it what you want over USB Serial and receiving the results back.

This project connects to Home Assistant to control lights using automations. To display the current state of the lights, the MacroPad will be publishing its control changes, and it will have the host computer subscribe to the MQTT topics of the devices to grab their state and change the color of the keys accordingly.

Since the MacroPad has a rotary encoder, this project uses it to control device dimming. Since the state of the lights and the brightness of the light can usually be controlled by the switch itself and the controls in Home Assistant, in addition to the MacroPad, it made sense to only send the MacroPad state changes, such as the rotary encoder changes, rather than trying to keep track of the state on the MacroPad itself.

Parts