u/jbstechdude

Introducing HA Batocera

One of the things I've always wanted was to see my Batocera system show up in Home Assistant as more than just a PC on the network. I wanted Home Assistant to know what game I was playing, what emulator was running, whether controllers were connected, how long I had been gaming, and even basic system statistics.

That's what led me to create HA Batocera.

HA Batocera is currently a lightweight Batocera agent that publishes gaming and system data to Home Assistant through MQTT, with the long-term goal of becoming a full HACS integration that can be installed and configured directly from Home Assistant.

Current features include:

✅ Current game tracking
✅ Last played game tracking
✅ Emulator tracking
✅ Current and previous play sessions
✅ Controller detection and battery monitoring
✅ CPU, RAM, storage, and uptime monitoring
✅ Batocera version and update monitoring
✅ Reboot and shutdown controls
✅ Home Assistant friendly MQTT integration

The project is still in active development (pre-v1.0), but it's already fully functional and has become a permanent part of my own Home Assistant setup.

What excites me most isn't just the sensors themselves, but what they enable. Home Assistant can now react to gaming activity in meaningful ways through dashboards, notifications, statistics, lighting automations, TV source switching, gaming scenes, and entirely custom automations.

More importantly, it opens the door to creating a true "pick up and play" experience for Batocera, similar to modern gaming consoles. By combining HA Batocera with Home Assistant automations, simply picking up a controller can trigger a chain of actions that powers on devices, switches inputs, activates gaming scenes, and gets everything ready to play without reaching for multiple remotes.

My ultimate goal is for HA Batocera to evolve into a complete Home Assistant integration with HACS support, making Batocera feel as integrated into Home Assistant as any other smart device in the home.

GitHub:
https://github.com/jbslabs/HA-Batocera

I'd love feedback, ideas, feature requests, and contributions from both the Home Assistant and Batocera communities.

A few months ago, I bought a Pimoroni Presto after watching a demo of the original PrestoDeck project on YouTube.

Unfortunately, by the time the hardware arrived, Spotify had announced new API restrictions that effectively limited playback control to a single developer application. Since I was already using Spotify through Home Assistant, giving that up wasn't an option.

So I ended up with a very cool device sitting on my desk with no practical use for months.

I looked around for alternatives (some of you may have seen my posts from a few months back) but couldn't find a solution that worked with my primary music setup, which had since become Plex through Plexamp and Music Assistant. After letting the device collect dust for a while, I finally had a Thanos moment and thought:

"Fine. I'll do it myself."

The result is a fork of PrestoDeck that replaces the direct Spotify integration with Music Assistant. Instead of being tied to a single music provider, it can now work with anything supported by Music Assistant, including Spotify, Plex, TIDAL, Apple Music, local libraries, internet radio, and more.

Some other improvements I added:

• Updated Music Assistant/Home Assistant branding
• Home Assistant MQTT Discovery
• Home Assistant device integration for display and LED controls remotely
• Tap-to-wake support
• Scrolling text for long track titles
• Improved Unicode support
• Automatic MQTT reconnection and recovery

I'm sharing it in case anyone else bought a Presto and ran into the same Spotify API limitations.

Project: https://github.com/jbslabs/PrestoDeckforMA

Huge credit to AkzDev for creating the original PrestoDeck project and providing the inspiration for this fork.

I love MusicBrainz and everything the project and community have done to build such an incredible music database, but I swear, building a video game music collection can be incredibly frustrating.

How am I supposed to know what to search for when an artist is listed only as 石元丈晴? If I'm trying to find their music on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Lidarr, or anywhere else, I have no idea what to type unless I already know that the artist's name is Takeharu Ishimoto.

My biggest issue is that this is happening on the English-version of the site. If I was in Japan and only had access to the Japanese version of the site then it makes sense for the entire site to be in Japanese, that would make perfect sense. But mixing Japanese kanji with English metadata creates a nightmare for collectors. You can only have one or the other on a specific version of the site, not both. Many of us are building large libraries for Plex, Jellyfin, or other media servers. We need artist names to be searchable, recognizable, and consistent across platforms. At the very least, the primary display name on the English site should be the romanized version (Takeharu Ishimoto), with the Japanese name (石元丈晴) included alongside it.

The same issue applies to song titles and album names. When I'm trying to build a collection, match metadata, or search for releases, having entries displayed only in Japanese script makes the process far more difficult than it needs to be. Showing both versions is great. Showing only the Japanese version on an English site creates unnecessary barriers for the people trying to use the data.