I  am having trouble building an ‘in-house’ Roku Remote controller for both a Roku4 w/ an old Dynex (dumb) TV as well as a newer TCL Roku Smart TV and soundbar combination, all residing on the same in-house WiFi network.

Purpose: We [wife and I] are old. My wife sees very poorly and often forgets how to navigate the Roku content via the physical remote(s).

Goals: Visually big UI with audio feedback and additional ‘drop-down-menus’ providing CEP command sequencing for customizing her favorite content navigation - and a big real-time digital clock.

I added an ESP8266 nodeMCU for the Dynex TV [on/off, volume up/down and mute] and SoundBar IR commands. It also provides a LAN server delivering an HTML/javascript based remote controller to all of our devices - computer, tablets and mobile phones. 

This setup is working well for all but the ECP ‘query’ commands which do not work from the remote as a browser web page - HTML/CSS via javascript.

Question: How can I access Roku data provided by ECP queries like '/query/apps' and '/query/active-app' via the ESP8266 setup as an http-client/server? Do I need to configure the ESP8266 nodeMCU as an UPnP device as well? (…and how to do such for I know nothing about UPnP.)

I am an old man certainly not a developer. I am looking for help or better yet,  a working example to test and learn from. I use the Arduino IDE with the ESP8266 nodeMCU providing a ‘limited’ C programing capability.

I was referred to this forum by renojim here: https://forums.roku.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=142534&p=632763&hilit=esp8266#p632763

I know that I am asking a lot here, but any help will be appreciated. Thanks.