On Modding TVs

If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share with you how amazing the Hisense Canvas TV is and the incredible setup that Codex helped me build with it.

First off, it looks so much better than a regular TV, it’s crazy. I previously had a TV up on the wall of my office here and I absolutely hated having it there, it was ugly and I never actually used it for anything. While you’re going to know it’s a TV, it looks good enough and the art display works so well, you just don’t mind and it blends into the background.

The Software

But the truly amazing part is what you can do with hacking it, because the Hisense Canvas (like many TVs now) runs Google TV, which is just Android with a TV specific skin. Which means you can turn on Android Debug Bridge (aka ‘ADB’), point your coding agent at it, and have it go to town stripping out bloatware, putting on a custom launcher, and building your own experience for it.

By default, whenever I’m working in my office, the art mode is just up and running in the background. I can use my Stream Deck to easily pull up various dashboards or things I may want to see (like a live feed of my chickens), but the coolest things happen automatically.

Where it gets really cool is the automations enabled by Home Assistant. If someone rings the doorbell, the live feed from my doorbell camera pops up on it. And because I really like planes, I built Overhead so that if a plane is flying over the house, it automatically pops up and shows it to me.

The Stack

The basic architecture is simple: Home Assistant decides what to show and uses ADB to open a page in TV Bro. The TV renders the dashboards and camera feeds locally, so there’s no phone or computer continuously casting to it. Hisense’s native Art Mode remains the default, and Overhead returns to it automatically once the nearby aircraft have passed.

The key things you need besides the TV for this?

• Home Assistant — my home automation software that triggers and controls everything - technically you don’t need this and could trigger the TV with other software you build, but I already have it and it works great.
• TV Bro — Android TV browser displaying the apps full-screen - much better than any of the default browsers a TV would include.
• Projectivy Launcher — clean replacement home screen on the Hisense CanvasTV.
• Overhead — this is the app I built that is the display for planes flying over the house.

And of course Codex or Claude Code for actually executing the modifications to the TV and building any of the software that you want. You can figure out what’s possible by pointing it at this blog post and generally telling it what you want to do.