Missing the click wheel on your old iPod? Here’s a fun DIY: a How-To Geek reader turned an old Zigbee smart home remote — the kind with a circular color wheel for lights — into a physical click wheel for browsing music on his Home Assistant setup. Spin your thumb around the wheel and album covers fly past like it’s 2008.
Zigbee remote color wheel (Credits: How-To Geek)
What You Need
The key piece is a Zigbee remote with a circular color-select touch wheel — the author’s model was meant for controlling smart lights, with sliders for brightness and color temperature. You’ll also need Home Assistant running in your home and the remote paired through Zigbee2MQTT.
How It Works: Reading the Color Wheel
Once paired, the color wheel produces a number from 0 to 254 representing the position on the wheel, and as you move your thumb around the ring, new readings arrive about three times a second. By comparing two consecutive readings, you can tell which direction the thumb is scrolling — you just have to handle the wrap-around at the top of the wheel, where the value jumps from 254 back to 0.
Feed those direction readings into Home Assistant and map them to media player “next/previous track” or album-skip commands, and suddenly you’ve got a physical dial for flipping through your music library. The nostalgia hit is real: spinning your thumb and watching album covers fly past is exactly the Cover Flow sensation that Apple killed off with the click wheel.
Why It’s Worth Trying
The setup needs minimal interaction once configured — the whole point of a good smart home is automations that feel like magic rather than a control panel. And it costs nothing if you’ve already got a compatible remote gathering dust in a drawer.
Also Read: Android Batteries Grew 5x Since 2008 — So Why Do We Still Charge Every Night?
Source: How-To Geek — read the full story there.
