Tiny Wren

by Andy Shearer

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Fixing my Sony Bravia TV issues

My Sony Bravia 49XE9005 has a great picture and the size is just right.

Its software, however, is infuriating. I suffer from two main issues.

  1. Intermittently the TV won't select my Sonos Beam soundbar to output audio after switching on.
  2. Switching HDMI is too slow and makes me cry.

Thankfully, rather than spend a small fortune to buy a new TV only to have another set of problems, I've overcome them with Home Assistant!

Below roughly outlines what I did.

Setting up Home Assistant to control the TV

This was relatively straightforward — all the details can be found in the Integration guide. Before setting that up, I would highly recommend setting your TV's IP address as static in your router's DHCP settings.

Once set up, Home Assistant should look something like this.

Image showing the Sony Bravia device type in HomeAssistant

Now, this is the key bit that is easy to miss. Your TV can receive a multitude of remote commands, more than are on your remote. To find out these commands, the best way is to use the integration and send a "Test" command to the TV.

Image showing the script setup in HA

If you run that script you should see something like this in your Home Assistant Core logs.

Image showing the script setup in HA

Now you have a list of all the commands to fix your silly TV!

Fixing the soundbar issue

In my list of commands from Home Assistant there is one called "AudioOutput_AudioSystem". Sending this command forces the TV to select my soundbar when it fails to do so from time to time.

To ensure this happens automatically I set up an automation that, after the TV starts up, calls a script which sends that command.

Image showing the script to fix audio source

The automation looks like this. The 10 second delay is just to allow the TV to start some services so it doesn't ignore the request.

Image showing the script to fix audio source

Now this works for me — no more fumbling around the Sony interface to do what it should have done in the first place.

Switching the HDMI

I tend to only watch content from either my Apple TV or a YouView PVR connected over HDMI. For reasons I don't understand, the Apple TV, when started correctly, forces the TV to switch to that HDMI channel. However, the YouView box doesn't.

Switching the source is annoying using the Sony tv remote. To switch from my Apple TV to the YouView box I have to press the source button seven times, then OK — while dealing with input lag due to this TV's woeful performance. The fact they don't have HDMI select buttons but do have a Google Play button sums up how a business focus on profit over decent UX makes TVs terrible.

I digress. As above, I made two scripts that send the HDMI channel commands to the TV.

So now we have scripts that change the channel. But how to press the buttons?

Obviously I put them in a dashboard as a starting point.

HDMI buttons in a dashboard

But opening Home Assistant in an app or website is even slower than using the TV remote. So I opted to configure a single Aqara Zigbee button.

Then I mapped the button controls as follows:

showing the automation to link up the zigbee button press to the HDMI switch scripts

Conclusion

This is an admittedly extreme set of workarounds to get around issues I have with this TV. I'm really happy with the results, and naturally give massive thanks to the developers of Home Assistant and the integrations I've used here.

05/10/2025

The Digital Potting Shed

It’s obvious to say that the world shrank during the Covid lockdowns. For a Product Manager and recovering Engineer / Team Leader, it meant working from home and pottering around the house talking to plants far more than is probably healthy.

An aspect I didn’t expect was how much my technical inspiration had changed. In the before times, I would hunt the web, write loads on Twitter, post on blogs, make little scripts/sites and share them. Heck, I even used to chat on IRC groups. Covid somehow changed that. The world became a scarier place — harder to engage with, harder to read about, harder to interact with. Just… less nice, overall.

I’d also become slightly jaded with web technologies. There are probably a few reasons for this. After years of developing mobile apps, it’s easy to fall out of the loop with current web tech. I’m sure there are still wonderful places online, but I’d lost the joy of building simple websites. I found it baffling how many modern sites had become slower, harder to use, and oddly complex to get back into. Plus, I became more hesitant to run projects on the open web — especially with all the security concerns that come with it. These days, setting up a VM and installing WordPress just to play around with stuff, just isn't right.

So I became more obsessed with my small little world. The world on my LAN — where I could play with hacky things, learn, and tinker freely. A space to explore without worrying about Covid, or the outside world. My digital potting shed.

This might sound a little desperate. Or dull. Or maybe you’re picturing a bloke slowly retreating from society. Don’t despair though. I actually found the opposite to be true — and strangely, this little dive into my offline world inspired me more than I expected. So much, in fact, that it felt right to write some of it down. Which I guess... brings me here.

So what did this foray into my digital shed result in? A few things I’ll no doubt be posting about soon:

So, in the coming “insert time frame”, I’ll probably post a bit more about all of that.

16/04/2025

Hello.

My name is Andy, I build Apps and things for a living in the UK. This blog is where I’ll share a few thoughts and topics around tech, links I find interesting, and the occasional side project I create from time to time.

A few questions to get out of the way

Why "Tiny Wren"?

I love wrens. Their lovely round little bodies. Their oddly loud song. The absolute joy of seeing them bob around the garden between flower pots.

Perhaps a Tweet of the Day puts it best:

"[Their song] is the extrovert side of a normally introverted bird."

I’m a bit of an introverted bird myself — with a slightly round body.

What did you build this blog with?

I'm not a professional web developer, but I like to dabble. Here were my main requirements when choosing a platform:

1. Self-hosted

I want to control where I host my stuff. I want to own it — and be able to move it around if I choose to.

2. Avoid maintenance hell

In the past, I’ve used WordPress or some kind of Ruby-based platform. Frankly, it was a pain to maintain and a security nightmare.

These days, I don't want the hassle. I'm happy to skip more complex features (like comments or search) if it means less maintenance.

3. Fast

I despise slow, confusing, cumbersome websites that take forever to load. I want both the server and the site itself — HTML, JS, CSS — to be lightning fast.

4. Minimal JavaScript

I suck at JavaScript, and I want to keep it that way.

This is a blog, not a fancy web app. I don’t want to fight JS just to render something that HTML and CSS were built to handle.

5. Markdown-based writing

No WYSIWYG editors, thanks. I deal with enough of those at work in messy internal wikis.

Markdown is simple to use for me.

So what’s the setup?

Here’s what I ended up with:

Thats enough for now, I will at some point add some way to contact me. But in good time I think.

15/04/2025