5 ingenious ways to use a Fire TV Stick with Home Assistant

Published Oct 15, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. Many of us plug a Fire TV Stick into our TV, install the necessary streaming apps, and then never think about it again. If you use Home Assistant, your Fire TV Stick could become a useful part of your smart home. See who's at the door without interrupting your movie PiPup can show your doorbell feed on the screen Credit: mhoogenbosch / PiPup There's only one thing that's more annoying than the doorbell ringing while you're in the middle of watching a great TV show or movie. That's when you get up and answer the door, only to find that there's no one there, and a package has been left on your doorstep. A Fire TV Stick can help make this situation far less annoying. You can run a community-developed fork of an Android application called PiPup on the Fire TV Stick, which allows you to see your live video doorbell feed picture-in-picture on your TV screen when the doorbell rings, so you can decide whether you need to answer the door or not. You need to install the PiPup Home Assistant integration via HACS. You can then show any video feed on your screen, and even have it display for as long as motion is detected by the camera. Trigger automations when you start watching Fire2MQTT can detect playback changes almost instantly The official Fire TV integration in Home Assistant can detect whether the device is playing, paused, or idle. However, it uses Android Debug Bridge (ADB) to periodically poll the Fire TV Stick's state, so the state in Home Assistant can often lag behind the actual state. The integration can also have difficulty identifying playback states in some apps. Fire2MQTT is a community-developed project that runs a small application on the Fire TV Stick. Instead of Home Assistant having to continually ask the streaming stick for the current playback state, the app sends updates over MQTT as soon as the state changes. This is ideal for triggering automations based on playback state. You can have your lights dim when you start to play content and come back up again when you pause. Using Fire2MQTT, these automations can respond faster than with the official Home Assistant integration. Turn your TV into a giant Home Assistant dashboard A kiosk app can display your smart home data I'm not a huge fan of dashboards, or a fan of huge dashboards. If giant screens that display your Home Assistant data are your bag, however, then you can't get much bigger than your TV. There are several ways to get your Fire TV Stick to display a Home Assistant dashboard. One option is Kiosk Wall Panel, an app designed for displaying dashboards on Fire TV devices and Fire tablets. You can see your dashboards without browser tabs or address bars, giving you clean dashboards on the largest screen in your home. Kiosk Wall Panel is a paid app. There are other alternatives if you'd rather not pay. Launch your favorite streaming apps with a single button One of the most frustrating things about using any streaming box or smart TV is navigating to the streaming app that you want to use. The user interfaces are often clunky and require multiple steps to reach the app you want to launch. A Fire TV Stick can make that much less painful. The official Home Assistant integration supports sending commands to the Fire TV Stick via ADB, and one of the supported commands can launch installed applications. This means you can get Home Assistant to open the Netflix app, the Disney+ app, the Plex app, or any other app that you have installed. You can use these commands in automations to allow you to launch apps with a single press of a button or tap of a screen. I have an Aqara Cube that I use to launch streaming apps; I turn the cube to the appropriate side, and the relevant app will automatically be launched. Replace the Fire TV home screen with your own photo slideshow Firestick Minder can launch an app when you're not watching One of the worst things about Fire TV Sticks is the ads. When you're not watching a show or movie, the home screen will often display ads or recommendations. Instead of seeing these ads, you can get your Fire TV Stick to display your own photos instead. There's an app called Firestick Minder that you run on a computer or server which checks in on what the Fire TV Stick is displaying. If Firestick Minder detects that the home screen is being displayed, it can launch a different app, such as a photo slide show app. You can then have your family photos displayed on your TV instead of the ad-filled Fire Stick home screen. Firestick Minder supports MQTT, so Home Assistant can receive information about the TV's idle state, track how long the slide show has been showing, and power off the TV if no one is in the room to see it. Not every Fire TV Stick will work The projects above can make an ordinary Fire TV Stick far more useful. These projects won't work with every device, however. Recent Fire TV Stick models such as the Fire TV Stick HD (2026) and Fire TV Stick 4K Select (2025) run Vega OS instead of the Android-based Fire OS, so they don't support ADB. With older devices, however, a Fire TV Stick can be a genuinely useful smart home tool.