Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.
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Home Assistant can be self-installed on ProxMox, Raspberry Pi, or even purchased pre-installed: Home Assistant: Installation
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We have a ZzZ script which slowly turns off the TV and lights.
It works from one end of the house through the kitchen, then lounge, then up the stairs, the idea is it follows me to bed turning off things as I'm walking...
A separate script tells me that it's time for bed (as I find finishing the day difficult).
Not as fancy but an hour before my bed time my small stained glass lamp turns on as a reminder I have an hour left. 5 minutes before bed my phone goes into night mode. At bed time all the lights in my room shut off. It's been way more effective than my ADHD ass having no idea what time it is and staying up super late.
I have 4 lights in my room that I use for different things. Ceiling light, light above my bed, lights hanging from the high part of the vaulted ceiling (these are yellow glass really pretty but kinda dim great for before bed) and a small stained glass lamp.
I have an automation to turn on the small stained glass lamp at 7 because that's when I should be getting ready to get in bed, wind down, read a book, something like that. At 825 my phone goes into sleep mode, night light and night mode activated. At 830 all the lights in my room turn off and my fan turns on.
At 330am my alarm goes off and the stained glass lamp turns on and the fan turns off. It's dim enough to not be blinding but bright enough I won't just turn my alarm off. At 340 the yellow lights come on to make sure my ass gets up. As I'm walking out of my room, I can double tap the light switch down and it will turn off all 4 lights and the fan if any of the above are on.
I also have a button hanging by a command strip on my night stand that can control everything for when I'm too lazy to open the app on my phone 😂
I made an automated sandwich maker. The automation turns it on, sets a timer, shows the timer on tv, turns it off when the timer goes off, pauses the tv and turns lights in kitchen on, if after sunset. Ridiculous? Jup. But also super cool.
Turn the lights on and off in the basement. The kids kept playing with the lights and arguing over it, so I automated the whole floor and blocked the switches off.
Arguments immediately stopped.
Laziest eh? Probably the one that deletes completed items from my shopping list when I leave the supermarket, because I got sick of doing it manually.
Most ridiculous would be the NFC tag I have on the lid of my cold brew coffee jug. I make a batch so rarely that I can never remember how much coffee to add, so scanning the tag makes my Google Home say; "You want 80g of coffee per litre, or 6 scoops."
That's a good idea I'm gonna steal it. You should make a blueprint.
I have an announcement play every 30 minutes to yell at me in a harsh voice "Drink Water God Damn It!" I forget to hydrate a lot. I've tried many other reminders, but none of them worked well. Turns out I just need someone to yell at me.
My son also has ADHD and my wife and I are that voice for him. I'm not sure where he gets it from. On an unrelated note, the days where I forget to eat are my most productive, so it's a good thing you don't need an 'eat God damn it" reminder.
I started drinking more water when I got a sport bottle with one of them built-in sipping straws. It's just near me most of the time, so I take some sips just to occupy myself for a few seconds.
Previously I drank a lot of tea, wherein the sign that I need to get more tea was when the cup was empty. But I'm off caffeine now.
Not sure this belongs, but my most proud automation is an automatic water bowl for my dogs. It automatically drains, rinses, and fills 16 times per day so they always have fresh water. They deserve a better life than my lazy ass can give them.
:O it's hooked to the tap and a drain I assume? How big is that?
Correct! It connects to a sink drain the same way a dishwasher does. It is actually a bathroom sink, the kind that sits on top of the counter. We have had three Great Danes at one time so trying to keep up with a clean water dish was really impossible. We no longer have large dogs but the desire to keep them in clean water persists.
Super cool. I'll have to keep that in mind for behind my kitchen wall 🤔
Mostly the ones that send a post from one social media app to another.
I have alerts that push out when the fridge door is open.
And another that flashes all the lights in the house when the doorbell rings.
Thought of another one...
I bought some TP-Link wifi bulbs that were flaky from the start. After some investigation I discovered that these particular bulbs felt it important to phone home to China every few seconds and became very, very unhappy if the lines were down. After a short tantrum they would reset their wifi connection before regaining consciousness. What that meant in my 3 bulb fixture was that when my “lights off” scene was triggered and my firewall was blocking their corporate masters, one or more of the bulbs was often in a stupor and would remain on indefinitely.
Did I just go spend $25 on some new, decent bulbs that actually worked? Nope - no way some stinking TP-Link bulbs were going to win! Instead I spent hours creating multiple redundant automations that checked for each possible failure state, kept polling the bulbs until their tantrum ended and they regained consciousness, and then turned off whatever bulbs were left on.
Every time I turned off the lights I was able to declare victory. After I felt they had learned their lesson I bought some Zigbee bulbs that actually work.
This is some shit I would do. Fuck you and your not working, I'll show you who's boss!
You're my spirit animal.
@spaghettiwestern The two that made me dive into the home assistant rabbit hole:
When the rabbits are out around sunset (door sensor on their cage) lights turn red and my and my wife's phone get a notification. Too many times we remembered that the rabbits were loose while it was pitch black. Not too good with black rabbits...
Fixing the mess that is my Marantz receiver, communicating with my TV over hdmi and lately my wiim streamer. Turn it on and off depending on need, controlling zone 2 as well as turning on power for the zone 2 amplifier when it's used in the receiver. The ridiculous part here is that it's necessary - these things should just work!
Did you post about this in the home assistant sub looking for recommendations on how to do this on Reddit awhile back? If not someone else did because I distinctly remember a rabbit notification and light setup lol. Wild the random info my brain retains 😂
"Good night" turns off all the lights in the house. I guess it's silly/lazy because at midnight all the lights turn off anyway.
I click a button when taking my pill so I don't take it twice by mistake, it also alerts me if I've forgotten my dose. Not really ridiculous, but I wanted to feel included lol
Do you have it set to tell you after x amount of pills to pickup new ones and/or see your doc for refills?
I've got a led strip on my toilet door. It turns red when someone is inside (mesured by the wasp in a box principle.
You should set up a speaker in your toilet and start to fade in orchestral music when the occupancy time is getting too long.
I'm unfamiliar with the wasp in a box principle. Is that the one where you keep a box of live wasps in the bathroom and determine if someone is in there based on how recently you've heard a scream?
Where do you guys find power outlets for all these weird placements of LED strips? :D Outlets in my house is not in great places for something like this.
I lucked out and was simply in a relationship with a gal whom I helped purchase a house with a handy switched power outlet near the ceiling which was likely intended for seasonal decorative lights.
I co-oped the outlet once we got married but I need to replace the piece of tape that keeps the light in with one of these multi-button zigbee mains-powered switches that fit in multi-gang decora plates. I refuse to do wifi unless I can run esphome on it, and I will only trust matter when it runs over thread.
I know there are some zwave rechargeable LED strips but they're pricey
I replaced my fridge light with an RGB zwave light and door sensor. This concept has been solved for decades and my solution is worse. But it also turns green...
My dishwasher automatically selects it's Eco program when powered on. The Eco program uses more water and more energy than the Auto program while also taking almost twice as long. So I have an automation that triggers when my dishwasher is powered on and then selects the Auto program for me - because pressing a button to change the program after loading the dishwasher would be too much to ask.