Still having and using a LOT of vintage gears at home.
Most of them predates IP/Ethernet and, if you're lucky, had one-way serial ports, or proprietary IR interfaces (SR, Control S, etc.) that you could leverage.
Ex: Pioneer or SONY LaserDisc players, Pioneer or SONY MUSE video decoders, Toshiba HDDVD players, early NEC DLP video projectors.
The project is to "standardize" all these vintage connections into IP:Port that can be accessed over Telnet or SSH. I initially used a RPi 3B+ as a proof-of-concept before investing in some specialized 2nd-hand hardware.
- Some recent players have IP control (ex: OPPO UDP-205) but the serial port has more control, especially power ON/OFF.
- For Serial port controlled devices, I acquired a MOXA NPort
- For IR port controlled devices, I'm on the market for a Global-Caché GC100-18/R with corresponding Xantech 794/797 modules
So far I have created control flows over RS-232 for OPPO BDP-105, UDP-205, Integra DHS-8.8, NEC HT1100, Lumagen Radiance 2144.
I can share them here if you are interested.
The end game is to have a VM run on my NAS on the LAN and offer a local website with virtual remote controls for all devices/button starting pre-defined scenarios (ex: play a laserdisc, turn on what's needed to listen to my AudioServer, activate external HDMI input with multi-channel audio decoding pre-set, etc.).
Since most of of the modern Home Automation software package rely on Bluetooth/Wifi/IP, none of them were applicable. Node-RED was the only only one I found with raw controls that allow to build whatever you want in an easy way.
Required nodes so far: contrib-telnet, contrib-binary, contrib-scenario
