Hi fellow HA hackers and developers, long time no see!
As many of you know, since the Astrion smart remote gained traction in the community, “Native WebView Mode” and “Dedicated Local Cards (like RosCard with direct API control)” have always been two parallel lines that never crossed:
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Go all-in on WebView: You get seamless compatibility with crazy HACS custom cards, but the physical buttons lose their edge, and navigating them on a small remote screen becomes an absolute nightmare.
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Go all-in on Native Cards: You get that butter-smooth, tactile “blind-control” experience (latency < 20ms), but it can never keep up with the breakneck speed of your ever-evolving, heavily-modded Lovelace dashboards.
As the underlying R&D team behind the remote, we’ve been dead-set on cracking this pain point. We wanted a solution where you get “One Canvas (Lovelace Web) to rule them all” while retaining the “Physical Tactility (Native OS) for AV blind-control.”
Just this week, our R&D team hit a massive breakthrough.
Our Exploration: Semantic Focus Tracking + Native Hijacking for AV Devices
We have successfully validated a Hybrid Control Architecture:
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Standard Smart Devices (Lights/Switches/Curtains/Sensors) via HA Lovelace: We wrote a custom Shadow DOM traversal algorithm directly inside the WebView. When you press the physical D-Pad to move your cursor, our native backend bypasses the web surface entirely, extracts the underlying
entity_id, and fires commands via a local WebSocket connection. We’ve completely eliminated the clunky “simulated web clicks,” compressing the response latency down to around 20ms! -
AV/Media Devices via Native RosCard Logic: This is where the real magic happens. Let’s be honest—good TV/receiver/media player cards on HA are few and far February, and no one wants to look down at a touchscreen while changing channels during a movie. Now, the moment your focus hits or clicks an AV media card, the remote automatically detects it. You think you’re still browsing a webpage, but the remote’s physical keys (D-Pad, Volume, Play/Pause, Menu, Back) are instantly hijacked by the Native OS, or the remote smoothly fades in a dedicated RosCard control panel optimized specifically for our 480x800 screen.
Simply put: “Standard cards stay on the web to look pretty, while AV media components that heavily rely on tactical blind-control are highjacked by our native RosCard engine.” Even better, we support adding custom astrion_config data blocks in your YAML. This means you guys can completely design, script, and define your own proprietary physical button macro mappings and card behaviors.
[I’ve recorded a brief engineering-demo video here (Click to Watch)] Please pay close attention to:
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A prominent focus box miraculously appearing over the WebView.
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Smoothly switching Dashboard focus using nothing but the D-Pad.
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Controlling essential functions purely through physical hardware keys.
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Deep/advanced settings still seamlessly supporting touch interaction.
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The UI automatically routing to the local native RosCard controls upon selecting AV elements.
The Hardcore Bottleneck We Hit (And why we are posting this)
While the proof of concept runs flawlessly, we hit a massive brick wall when pushing it to production: We are redlining the hardware resources.
Our HA100 runs on an MTK6580 chip with 1GB RAM. When handling heavy, modded Lovelace dashboards loaded with WebGL, intense animations, and real-time history charts—on top of running our real-time semantic focus tracker and high-frequency button interception state machines—it easily triggers OOM (Out of Memory) errors, leading to WebView crashes or blank screens.
To unleash this “ultimate feature” smoothly and stably at a locked 60 FPS, we absolutely need to upgrade to a much more powerful, efficient 12nm 8-core MTK6762 platform backed by significantly larger memory.
Naturally, this will drive up the raw hardware manufacturing cost.
We’d Love to Hear Your Thoughts
As developers and the ultimate power-users of this device, your feedback means everything to us. We’d love to open the floor to two questions:
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For this hybrid “Lovelace Web View + Native RosCard Hijacking for AV” approach, along with the sheer hackability of defining hardware macros via YAML—do you see this as a killer feature? Does it resonate with your setup?
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To flawlessly support this feature without stutters or crashes, if we transition the next-gen hardware to the MTK6762 platform, would you be willing to accept the corresponding price premium for the upgraded specs?
This is more than just a software update; it’s our starting line for open-sourcing this entire core tracking logic to the GitHub HA community.
Drop your brutal roasts, feature requests, or feedback in the comments below. Our R&D team is camp-fired right here in the thread waiting for your input—your voice will directly decide how hard we push on the upcoming hardware overhaul!
