// the take
ESP32/Arduino firmware for the OMOTE open-source universal remote: an LVGL touchscreen UI driving IR, BLE (as a Bluetooth keyboard for Fire TV), and MQTT smart-home control. It's for people building or already holding the OMOTE hardware who are willing to write C++ device drivers rather than click through a config UI.
The windows_linux HAL target is a genuinely useful dev tool — you can iterate on LVGL screens in VS Code/PlatformIO on a desktop without flashing anything, with a working keypad GUI stand-in for the physical buttons. Device support is organized as one folder per device (device_samsungTV, device_yamahaAmp, etc.) with a separate devices_pool for community-contributed drivers that aren't compiled by default, keeping the main build lean. CI builds the firmware and simulator on Ubuntu, Windows, and macOS on every push, which is more coverage than most hobby embedded projects bother with. The hardware/software split (hardwareLayer.h plus per-platform implementations) means adding a new board variant doesn't require touching device or scene logic.
There's no prebuilt firmware and no config file — every change (which TV, which amp, your WiFi/MQTT secrets) means editing C++ headers (secrets.h) and recompiling with PlatformIO, so this is a from-source project for the foreseeable future. The README's own long-term to-do list admits configuration isn't stored as editable JSON yet, it's baked into flash at compile time. There are no unit tests for the parts most likely to break in someone else's environment — IR protocol decoding, BLE keyboard pairing, MQTT reconnect logic — CI only proves it compiles, not that it works. It's also fundamentally tied to the companion OMOTE-Hardware board; the HAL separates platform code but you'd still be writing real driver work to run this on a different ESP32 display/button layout.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →