Build a Smart Backyard World Cup Watch Party With Home Assistant

I did not set out to automate my backyard. It happened because the third night of the World Cup involved me walking back and forth across the lawn four times: once to plug in the projector, once to turn on the patio lights, once to find an extension cord, and once to fetch a speaker because the projector was too quiet. By the fourth night I had decided that the entire setup was going to turn on with a single tap on my phone, and that is exactly what I built.

This is the practical version of that build. It runs on Home Assistant, it leans on local control wherever possible so it keeps working when the WiFi hiccups, and it costs a fraction of what you would expect. Here is the whole thing, hardware and automations included.

The Goal: One Tap, Whole Yard

The target is simple. I tap one button labeled “Match Night” and the following happens at once:

• The patio string lights fade up to a warm, dim level so we can see snacks without washing out the screen.
• A notification confirms the projector power station is charged enough to last the game.
• The outdoor speaker is ready and the streaming stick is awake.

At the final whistle I tap “All Off” and the yard goes dark and quiet. No walking around. No four trips. That is the entire user experience, and everything below exists to make those two taps work reliably.

The Hardware Layer

You need four things beyond the projector and screen themselves (which I covered in detail in my outdoor projector guide). None of this is exotic.

Smart lighting that survives weather: Govee Outdoor String Lights 2

The lighting is the part that makes a backyard feel like an event instead of a campsite. I use the Govee Outdoor String Lights 2, and the key reason is the newest version speaks Matter. That means I can pair them directly into Home Assistant over my local network with no Govee cloud account in the loop, so the lights respond instantly and keep working even if their servers are down.

They are IP65 rated, the warm-white dimming is genuinely warm and not the sickly blue that cheap strings default to, and the RGB modes are there if you want to throw your team’s colors across the fence for a goal celebration. The 96-foot version wraps a decent-sized yard. Get them on the network, and they become a tool Home Assistant can orchestrate.

Outdoor audio that cuts through chatter: JBL Charge 5

Projector speakers are fine for a quiet movie. They are not fine for a backyard full of people yelling at a referee. The JBL Charge 5 is the speaker I land on because it is loud, it is genuinely waterproof at IP67, the battery lasts a full day of matches, and it doubles as a power bank if a phone dies. You pair it to the projector or streaming stick over Bluetooth and suddenly the commentary carries across the whole yard.

It will not integrate into Home Assistant as a media player over Bluetooth, and that is fine. Its job is to be loud and waterproof, and it does both. The automation handles everything else.

Portable power so the cord does not rule your life: Anker SOLIX C800

This is the piece that unlocked the whole thing for me. The Anker SOLIX C800 is a 768Wh LiFePO4 power station, which means a long lifespan and safe chemistry, and it has enough output to run a projector and the lights with room to spare. A 200-watt projector runs about three hours off it, which is a full match with extra time. No extension cord snaking across the lawn, no fighting for the one outdoor outlet.

The reason I like it for this specific job is that LiFePO4 cells tolerate sitting partially charged and being cycled often, so leaving it ready on the patio all summer does not degrade it the way an older lithium pack would. Charge it the morning of a match, set it next to the projector, and the only cable in your yard is the short one from the station to the projector.

A real streaming stick: Fire TV Stick 4K Max

If your projector has a smart OS built in, you can skip this. But many of the brightest, best-value projectors (the Epson in my projector guide, for one) have no smart software at all, and even the ones that do are often slow. A Fire TV Stick 4K Max plugs into any HDMI port, boots fast, and handles whichever streaming service has the match. It also exposes itself to Home Assistant over the network, so the automation can wake it as part of the scene.

The Home Assistant Layer

Now the fun part. With the lights on the network via Matter and the streaming stick discoverable, Home Assistant can pull the whole thing together. Two building blocks do almost all the work: a scene for the lighting state, and a script that chains everything into one action.

Step 1: A scene for the perfect lighting

A scene in Home Assistant captures an exact set of device states and lets you recall them instantly. The trick for a watch party is dim, warm light that lets people see without competing with the screen. Here is the scene definition. Drop it in your scenes.yaml:

- name: Match Night Lighting
  entities:
    light.patio_string_lights:
      state: on
      brightness_pct: 30
      color_temp_kelvin: 2200
    light.deck_step_lights:
      state: on
      brightness_pct: 50

Thirty percent at 2200 Kelvin is the level I landed on after a few games. Bright enough to find the guacamole, dim enough that the screen still pops. Adjust the brightness_pct to taste, and add any other lights you have to the list.

Step 2: A script that runs the whole show

The script is the single tap. It calls the lighting scene, wakes the streaming stick, and fires a confirmation notification so you know the yard is ready. Put this in scripts.yaml:

match_night:
  alias: Match Night
  sequence:
    - service: scene.turn_on
      target:
        entity_id: scene.match_night_lighting
    - service: remote.turn_on
      target:
        entity_id: remote.backyard_fire_tv
    - service: notify.mobile_app_phone
      data:
        title: Match Night is ready
        message: Lights are set and the screen is awake. Kickoff time.

That is the entire automation. One service call sets the mood, one wakes the screen, one tells you it worked. Reload your scripts and you have a script.match_night entity you can put on a dashboard, trigger by voice, or fire from a physical button.

Step 3: An “All Off” companion

The cleanup tap is even simpler. This scene turns everything off in one go:

- name: Match Night Off
  entities:
    light.patio_string_lights:
      state: off
    light.deck_step_lights:
      state: off

Wire that into a second script if you want a matching notification, or just drop the scene straight onto the dashboard next to the first button. Final whistle, one tap, dark yard.

Step 4 (optional): Make it celebrate goals

This is the bit that makes people grin. If you want a flourish, you can add an RGB flash to the Govee lights and trigger it manually when your team scores. A simple script:

goal_celebration:
  alias: Goal Celebration
  sequence:
    - service: light.turn_on
      target:
        entity_id: light.patio_string_lights
      data:
        rgb_color: [0, 200, 80]
        brightness_pct: 100
        flash: long
    - delay:
        seconds: 5
    - service: scene.turn_on
      target:
        entity_id: scene.match_night_lighting

Swap the rgb_color for your team’s colors, put the script on a big button on your phone, and let the kids be in charge of the celebration. Five seconds of full-brightness color, then it settles back to the watch-party scene automatically.

Why Local Control Matters Here

I want to flag one design choice. Everywhere I had an option, I picked the local path: Matter for the lights instead of the Govee cloud, a streaming stick on the LAN, a projector that does not phone home. The reason is that your backyard is the worst-case network environment. You are at the edge of WiFi range, the cloud is one dropped connection away from breaking your party, and the last thing you want when twenty people are watching is a “device unavailable” error because a server in another state hiccuped.

With Matter lights and local scenes, the entire automation runs on hardware in your house. The only thing that genuinely needs the internet is the match stream itself. Everything else (lights, scenes, notifications, the celebration flash) fires on your local network whether or not the wider internet is having a good day. Build it local and it just works.

What This Costs and What It Replaces

The smart layer here (lights, speaker, power station, streaming stick) runs around $500 all in, and most of it is reusable far beyond the World Cup. The lights stay up all summer. The power station handles camping, outages, and every other backyard movie night. The speaker goes everywhere. The streaming stick is permanent. You are not buying single-use tournament gear, you are building a backyard entertainment layer that happens to debut during the World Cup.

Compare that to the alternative, which is a weatherproof outdoor TV starting north of $1500 and topping out at a smaller screen than a projector throws. The smart-projector-and-automation route is cheaper, bigger, and more flexible, and it disappears into a closet when summer ends.

The Bottom Line

The World Cup is the perfect excuse to finally automate the backyard, because it gives you a month of real-world testing and a houseful of people to impress. The build is genuinely simple: get your lights on Matter, put a power station next to the projector, pair a loud waterproof speaker, and let Home Assistant tie it together with one scene and one script.

Start with the lights and the power station, because those two do the most work. Add the scene and the script, and you go from four trips across the lawn to one tap on your phone. By the knockout rounds you will have the most-requested house on the street, and the only effort left will be making enough snacks.