PiPup — TV Notifications

PiPup displays custom pop-up (picture-in-picture style) notifications on your Android TV. It runs a small web server on the TV, so any device on your network — most often a home-automation system like Home Assistant — can send it an HTTP request and an overlay instantly appears on screen, on top of whatever you're watching.

No cloud, no account, no subscription. Everything stays on your local network.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
• Show a camera snapshot on the TV when motion is detected
• Display a live doorbell or camera stream when someone's at the door
• Announce when the laundry is done — spoken aloud with text-to-speech
• Surface any smart-home alert on the biggest screen in the house

RICH NOTIFICATIONS
• Title and message with custom colors, sizes, and on-screen position
• Images, animated GIFs, videos, and live RTSP/HLS camera streams
• Embedded web pages, uploaded image files, or inline base64 images
• Text-to-speech and sound playback
• Rounded corners, borders, a leading icon, and a countdown progress bar
• Stack multiple notifications on screen at once, each with its own timer

EASY TO INTEGRATE
• Simple HTTP/JSON API — call it from Home Assistant, Node-RED, scripts, or curl
• Ready-made Home Assistant rest_command example in the docs
• mDNS/Bonjour discovery so clients can find the TV automatically
• JSON status endpoint and shown/dismissed delivery callbacks
• On-screen setup: the TV shows its address, a QR code, and a test button

PRIVATE AND SECURE BY DESIGN
• Runs entirely on your local network — nothing is sent to the cloud
• Optional bearer-token authentication
• Optional IP allowlist to restrict who can trigger notifications

BUILT TO STAY RUNNING
• Foreground service that restarts automatically after a reboot
• Background watchdog keeps the server alive

COMPATIBILITY
• Android TV (Leanback) devices such as the NVIDIA Shield TV
• Requires Android 7.0 or newer
• Default server port 7979 (configurable)

PiPup is a modernized, open-source fork of the original PiPup by rogro82, updated for current Android TV.

Note: to draw overlays on top of other apps, PiPup needs the "display over other apps" permission. Android TV has no on-screen toggle for it, so it's granted via adb during first-time setup — see the project README.