Roku Alarm Clock
I have a Roku TV. I wanted an alarm clock that would turn it on and play something at a specific time. Nothing on the Roku channel store did exactly what I wanted, so I did what any reasonable person does: spent significantly more time building it from scratch than it would’ve taken to just wake up manually.
The result is a self-hosted Python server that talks to Roku devices over the local network via their External Control API. Set alarms through a REST API, have it wake up your TV, launch an app, the whole thing. Docker-ized so it runs happily on a Raspberry Pi and survives reboots.
Is it overengineered? Yes. Does it work? Also yes.
Stack: Python, Docker, REST APIs, existential commitment to homelab projects