I've considered making a bastardised IR Arduino/raspberry pi remote based on sound levels. But of course I can never muster the motivation and don't have practical experience.

Just have to hook up a mic to listen, and tune the audio level results so it's somewhat smart.

For TVs that connect to your network, there might be a built-in integration, or you can keep it simple and write API calls yourself in node-red.

If you have a dumb TV (not internet connected), then you'll probably be limited to solutions involving IR Trasmitters via MySensors[0] or EspHome[1].

[0] https://www.mysensors.org/build/ir [1] https://esphome.io/components/remote_transmitter.html

It’s also not so much about Alexa but about Node Red, I believe Alexa is just one possible source of sound in the whole system.

I've done a lot of automation using HA and Zigbee and Tasmota devices, and it's been awesome. I have no cloud I rely on for anything. When my Internet service goes down seemingly every night at 12:30am, I'm glad I can still control lights, alarms, etc.

Imagine the day after a hurricane has passed, needing to go find information before everyone else (even before the govt). Well, you can scan Twitter accounts who are posting videos and pics within a certain radius, scan for open local facebook groups with pic and video posts, scan instagram accounts for pics and videos (no api available for instagram), scan for public security camera feeds within a radius, etc. Being able to automate that makes your data gathering infinitely more effective. Doing it manually has an upper limit of what all you can check every hour, particularly when you get busy with other things.

RSS-Bridge is a scraping framework specifically for this purpose, that allows you to quickly write up scraping scripts and serve them as RSS feeds.

Of course scraping is all fine and good, but getting the data you find into a central database is where the magic happens. Even if you automate the scraping, you're going to have to centralize the data and serve your own API to it, or build a simple site to render it all, and have it in a store that allows it to be effectively queried. So how much time would it take to build scrapers for 5-7 different sites, plus database schema and database queries to store the data you get from them, plus a manually constructed API to serve the data from your database back out, plus a UI to render it all? For one dev that's a project of a few days at least, but you don't have a few days. The whole thing, from the standpoint of a rapid-response NGO, is gonna be over in a week when the FEMA and Red Cross trucks get deployed. You need to be able to do all of this quickly.

With Node Red you can build all that in a couple of hours, rather than a couple of days.

Being able to quickly integrate 3rd party API data and 3rd party libs with minimal custom code is a huge benefit too, in the same sort of activity. Node Red has a script that auto-generates nodes for Swagger API definitions, so you don't have to read docs and write integration functions to tie in third party data to a particular set of business logic, you just drag and drop it and pluck out the parts of the response objects you need.

For example, I built a rudimentary UPC scanning capable inventory system, also in about two hours. It went like...

Page with camera access button, quantity box, and submit button -> vanilla JS UPC reading library -> screenshot to base64 on the image for UI rendering -> Kroger product data API to fetch pricing info -> Postgres query for the returned item, if it exists increment by qty, if it does not exist create it with qty.

Now someone can scan donated items with their phone. Sure, it has rudimentary (at best) error handling and you have to explain that to the person doing the scanning, but if you're on a time limit and need something right now it can be done.

How long would it take to write all that by hand? Surely more than 2 hours. Re-creating oauth boilerplate for API authentication alone would probably take a good chunk of the first hour, whereas with Node Red you just fill a form with the headers and it's done.

There's a third party set of nodes called "action flows" that does a pretty good job of implementing for/while loops, but it's not trivial to just install and use, you have to learn its conventions to use it properly.

I gotta think most developers would install it, poke around for awhile, see that there's no obvious way to implement a loop, and throw it away when they don't find one.