The detail that got me is the timing problem itself: the goal alerts arrive before the goal even shows up on the stream being watched. The lights would spoil the moment, so the maker added a slider in Home Assistant that delays the celebration by 15 to 45 seconds. That a sports feed beats the live broadcast is the kind of quirk nobody thinks about until they build this, and solving it with a simple adjustable delay is elegant.
The setup covers the whole apartment. Philips Hue bulbs sit in hanging fixtures in the room and in the adjacent hallway, an LED strip runs along the back of the Samsung flat panel, and the wall behind the television glows strongly red during the broadcast. The audio system plays the arena goal horn and celebration music, with the equipment tucked on the shelves below the screen. When a goal lands, the lights pulse bright red in sync across fixtures and doorways while the horn blasts.
Under the hood, the maker wrote a custom web service that fires goal events, plus a component connecting Home Assistant to it. Home Assistant's built-in component then consumes the goal messages and triggers the event. Games come in through NHL GameCenter streams, and any reflected state can act as a condition, such as being home, time of day, Kodi running, or a Harmony activity. Running it needs a device for Home Assistant, like a Raspberry Pi or a spare PC.
The open trade-off is that streams vary, so the ideal delay differs between them. When timing drifts, the maker counts in their head and nudges the delay in the client, though adjustments are rarely needed now. More details live on the maker's blog.
Project by Craig Midwinter. Watch it on their YouTube channel: