My mother-in-law unfortunately has dementia to the point that she has forgotten how to use a television remote. She watches television, but pretty much only NHK (Japan’s national channel) and the all-the-time-samurai-movie channel. Everytime she got sick of one of these, she would come in and ask us to change the channel to the other station. Either my wife or I would have to get up and go into her room to change the channel for her–not a big deal-but a bit inconvenient nonetheless.
Since I had already used a “Black bean” to deal with the air conditioner at my apartment, I knew there was an easier way to do this. I looked around a bit more and found a product similar to the Black bean called the Orvibo Magic Cube.
I chose this product because it seems to have better support for Amazon Alexa/Google Home/Siri, and I was thinking if somehow I could hack one of those machines so the my mother-in-law could just say “NHK” and have the channel change, that would be cool. I haven’t got that far, but in the companion app to the Orvibo Magic Cube, I have two macro buttons. One is for the NHK channel, and the other is for the Samurai Movie channel. Now when she comes in, I just ask which channel she wants, and the deed is done!