Welcome to Incremental Social! Learn more about this project here!
Check out lemmyverse to find more communities to join from here!

Home Assistant things you'd miss now; what is a great little thing HA does for you, I'll start.

So last week I had a Proxmox fuckup and lost everything. I learnt the hard way what living without backups is like and I don't recommend it.

Silver lining is that I don't have to tidy up all those old automations and entities anymore.

Anyway it made me realise what I'd miss if I didn't have them, because I didn't have them.

I've been really really tired this week. I get up at 5am and start work at 6, and while I don't like it, I usually cope with it better than most and have comments about how "It's too early for you." But not this week.

I've put it down to losing my connection between my alarm clock and HA. I use SleepAsAndroid and have done for a long time. Back when I started it was because it connected to Tasker, but over the years I've moved to HA and still use it.

SleepAsAndroid with Tasker was done with web hooks but I use the MQTT integration with HA. This means it's connected when I'm home but not in network when I'm away, so it can't fire the messages, which is what you want.

Previously I used Node Red to set up this automation but I haven't reinstalled it yet, I'm seeing if I can do it all on HA, then it's one less thing and I can automate in the app.

I spent a while this morning trying to figure out how to reintegrate it with HA and struggled, but eventually I found an integration in HACS which meant I just had to change my device identifier in the alarm app by adding /MyName to the end of the SleepAsAndroid topic so it reads SleepAsAndroid/MyName, add the HACS integration and then add it again in the Integrations pane, with MyName plumbed in.

Then I added a blueprint from the add ons page and left the house to go on a day trip.

In and amongst the day trip I've been making my automation on the HA app via the blueprint, and have come home, loaded a bowl and set my alarm for 1 minute time, then smoke the bowl and wait...

Success!

Hopefully I'll have more energy this week when I wake up to my lights turning on, instead of complete darkness and a strange noise.

Now what would you miss that isn't obvious (like motion activated lights)?

KISSmyOSFeddit ,

I barely understood half the words you wrote, but most importantly, I didn't understand what that actually achieves that can't be done with a phone alarm set to 5am Mo-Fr?

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Well that's kinda the point, it's such a small change that makes such a big difference.

a phone alarm set to 5am Mo-Fr?

That's exactly what it is. My Home Assistant picks the alarm up and turns my lights on. My alarm runs silent for a minute then ramps up the volume.

So I don't wake up to pitch blackness with the sound of a fucking rainstorm. Instead I wake up to a light, look around, then hear my alarm and realise it's time to get up.

It's a small change, but it makes getting up so much easier.

june ,

My hallway is shockingly dark when not lit, and the recessed light is so damn harsh I decided to install LED strips up in the corners. But I didn’t want to switch them, so the lights are motion controlled and conditional based on time. During the day, they’re full bright but with a nice color that’s not harsh. At night, only 6 leds light up a nice green so they don’t blast your eyes in the dark.

I have similar control over the kitchen lights but kept the recessed lighting in there. Full bright during the day, dimmed at night.

When the home alarm is triggered, all lights go full bright.

When the garage door is opened, the garage lights turn on.

When the temp in the living room is below 65 in the morning, or at noon, it kicks the heater on until it hits 70.

In the evening, when the outside temp falls below the inside temp, I get sent a message to open the windows. This only triggers in warm months because that crossover doesn’t happen in the cold months. It’s just always warmer inside than out. Similarly, in the mornings, when the temp outside becomes warmer than inside, I get an alert to close the windows. I use Aqara temp sensors on my front and back porches to grab the temps, so it’s very local and takes into account the radiant heat built up from the direct sunlight and works really well. This also has me thinking I might be able to work my contact sensors into the automations too…

I’ve got a contact sensor on my bedroom door to alert me if anyone enters while I’m not home.

My crawl space is encapsulated and I have a large dehumidifier down there. I have a smart switch connected to it so I can have some easy control and monitor power usage. I also have a temp and humidity sensor down there with alerts for if either temp or humidity change too much.

I set up LED lighting on my front porch and have HA turn it on an hour before sunset and off an hour after sunrise. I set it to different colors usually based on holidays, but have it set to a purple that I really like otherwise. Way less harsh than the white porch light.

And of course I can control nearly all the lights in my house from my phone or with Siri.

SoNick ,

Most of my automations are lighting-based, so my favorites are both simple in theory but I can't imagine going without them:
1.) When I get home (or near home) and it's after dark, the living room lights and the TV turn on.
2.) Not really an automation on its own, but when I lay down to bed I turn off my bedroom lights through the HA app. I'm so used to it that the thought of turning the bedroom lights off at the switch then fumbling through the dark to bed sounds barbaric at this point.

alphapuggle ,

I just moved into a house with my friend and he gave me full reign to smart home the house. Every light has an Innr Zigbee bulb, which are great for having colors during parties and color temperature throughout the day (Adaptive Lighting in HACS), as well as motion controls in the hallway (which has a broken 2 way switch) and kitchen. The front porch light turns on when I come home if I'm on foot, and the back porch light comes on if I'm driving. The lights in the living room turn down if something's playing and it pauses if I leave the room. We've got an old android tablet I stole from the trash on the kitchen wall for a shopping list as well as an overview of the house. They washer and dryer have vibration sensors so we get an alert on our Google homes when our load is finished (we're both forgetful as fuck). I had an extra contact sensor left over from the doors that I put on the mailbox, so we get a nice AOL "you've got mail" when the mailman comes.

Frankly I don't know how I survived without automation. I forget things so much less now.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

I'm missing having my doorway light turning green when the door opens on Tuesday mornings, and the house telling me to "Take the Recycling up the stairs" hope I don't miss it tomorrow morning!

alphapuggle ,

I have a similar thing, it just sends me a notification to my phone on Tuesday night and it won't let me clear it unless I mark the trash as taken out

Lifebandit666 OP ,

That sounds just as good and easier to set up, think that's what I'm doing

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

Proxmox Backup Server is fucking awesome, BTW. There's also a good Proxmox integration in HACS for automations and alerts.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

There's also a good Proxmox integration in HACS for automations and alerts.

Huh I'm gonna have to find that!

I was thinking recently that I should look into WOL for my containers to save power, and maybe throwing a smart plug on my Proxmox PC to monitor power only (turn switching off)

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

Not sure if you mean WoL for the VMs or the proxmox node. I do the latter on my backup node so I can do HA failover without running it all the time. I have the PBS box wake it periodically to take a replication from the primary, and then shut it down, and wake it up if the primary stops responding so it can do the HA thing. The PBS box also acts as a quorum device.

brygphilomena ,

When I come home after sunset or the garage door opens after sunset, the lights between the garage and the house then on for 15 minutes.

At sunrise, all outdoor lights turn off in case I left any on the night before.

I have a button near my chair in the living room that turns on and off.
all 4 lights in the room.

When I leave the house, the robot vacuum does it's thing.

I have a single button that turns off all lights in the house.

Bocky ,

I have a wireless button next to my couch that toggles on and off the lights, and double click it to toggle the fan.

I added a bottom to my Apple Watch to toggle my garage doors, and chicken cook door.

All my light switches have a double click action programmed in for whatever is convenient at that location. Single click for the overhead lights, double click for the movie lighting, long press toggles the fan.

My solar panels send me a text when my battery bank is getting close to full and then triggers my car charger to turn on so that the excess power gets dumped into my cars instead of going to waste

IphtashuFitz ,

Our house has 5 heating & 2 AC zones that I installed Ecobee thermostats on. Three rooms also have skylights that can be opened. When we open the skylights the thermostats all turn off, and when closed they turn them back on to the mode they were previously set to.

Our house is set back in the woods on a long driveway. When either me or my wife arrives home after dark all the driveway / walkway lights turn on. And when we’re both away they all turn off.

I also have a “bedtime” button on my phone that turns off all the lights, locks the doors, turns off our WiFi speakers, puts all the Ecobees into sleep mode, etc.

MrMcGasion ,

I work night shift and use blackout curtains and earplugs to improve my sleep during the day. Rather than cranking the volume on my alarm so it's loud enough to consistently wake me up, I use Home Assistant to turn on some smart bulbs as my alarm. When I started, and even now if I have to be up extra early, I also have an audible alarm set to go off a few minutes after the lights come on - just in case the light doesn't wake me up, but at this point my brain has gotten used to waking up to the lights, and I usually wake up and turn off the other alarm before it goes off.

Another useful automation for me is I have a buggy Samsung PC monitor that has all sorts of annoying issues; like not consistently waking from deep sleep which requires a hard power cycle to correct, and when it is asleep there's some weird high pitched whine that beeps when the standby light flashes. I use a couple of smart plugs with power monitoring and monitor my PCs power draw to turn the power to my monitor on and off at the wall depending on if the PC is on.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

I've had a similar automation to turn my screen on and off and miss it, it needs setting up again. I'm halfway there though, I set up my Wake On Lan again yesterday.

I have a QI charger on my computer desk, it's the only one in the house. When I place my phone on the charger, HA sees the wireless charging and turns on my PC. It's a tiny quality of life improvement that I really missed, sit down and throw phone at the charger and the PC turns on.

jumjummy ,

Single Zigbee remote button push to go to bed. Turns off the computers, sets all thermostats back to auto mode (in case they were set manually), arms the house alarm, turns off all interior lights other than in the bedroom, locks all the doors, and pauses all music devices in the house.

sramder ,
@sramder@lemmy.world avatar

I turned to coffee maker on from my bed this morning :-)

APassenger ,

Sunset routine every evening, steps through over 150 separate RGB values over 45 minutes. Improved our sleep.

Turn off the cable box every night since the dwvs love to install new updates at 3 Am which iniitaites a restart, which, in turn, illuminates the entire bedroom. An unforgivable sin.

Recently: decided we'd get curtains and make everything smart. It wasn't a bank buster to get a couple gizmos. Night is dark and daytime the curtains open when my wife comes home - giving her the natural light she covets. Makes our humble 1000 Sq ft seem larger, besides.

Now replacing our Google hub with an old old tablet. The S4 seems almost perfect and wallpanel is great. Especially if coupled with ha-Floorplan.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Nice. I'd like some automated blinds myself for the front room. We have the slat blinds and the sunshine comes through at certain times and blinds (lol) you, would be nice to have them turn through the day to have sunlight without sunshine.

Buelldozer ,
@Buelldozer@lemmy.today avatar

What did you to move the curtains?

APassenger ,

Switchbot Curtain 3 for curtain rods. I like them, but carefully made sure they'd never have to climb the telescoping part of the rods. That... That it didn't seem awesome at.

All I did was extend the rods to the side maintaining symmetry and made sure the ridge was at mid-point.

smeg ,

Sunset routine every evening, steps through over 150 separate RGB values over 45 minutes.

Did you use the built-in Flux integration for that? I broke mine recently and it's a real pain having to do it manually!

APassenger ,

I did mine manually over a weekend. Built in variable length of time, transition periods and variable brightness vmbased on how bright it is (outside) when it runs.

There's actually 3 sets of 150+ RGBs. They're similar, but on is warmer, one is cooler, meaning the lights aren't all a match.

smeg ,

What did you use for outside brightness? Your own sensor or public weather data?

APassenger ,

I live in a place where clouds aren't often a factor, I only used the sun's elevation for that script.

At this point I could modify those values with cloud cover percent, but I haven't.

In short: it's calculated.

Slappula ,

There's an integration to Open Weather Map. You have to sign up for an API Key, but it's free. One of the sensors is cloud cover.

https://openweathermap.org/

smeg ,

Ooh nice, I'll give that a go, cheers!

SkaveRat ,

I don't have a lot of HA setup.

But I like to be able to control my living room lights from different places in the room (door and couch) as well as having keyboard shortcuts on my laptop for them

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Keyboard shortcuts sounds interesting, what do you do that with? Also what are the shortcuts you use? I would hate to be button bashing on Helldivers and inadvertently turning my lights on and off

SkaveRat ,

I use a combination of Win+L for the main light and Win in combination with some other keys around L, depending on the light.

I use xfce, and in the settings it's possible to define custom shortcuts, where I just use curl to send a request to the HA api.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Nice thanks I'll look into that

Schorsch ,

I have a very similar setup.
I switched to curl+webhook some days ago. Before that I used hass-cli to trigger actions on Home Assistant but I find webhooks to act much faster.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

My 10 year old son's most missed automation was the house telling him to go to bed. He noticed he was just chilling in bed with YouTube and it was well past his bedtime and asked me to set it up again.

Basically I automated bedtimes years ago so the house tells them to go to bed and an hour later turns their lights off. Didn't think they'd miss that but they did.

SkaveRat ,

next step: an hour later the tranquilizer sentries activate

__init__ ,

Any recommendations for tranquilizer sentries that work with HA?

paraphrand ,

I’m holding out for matter over thread, personally.

bitchkat ,

I prefer to give them the Benadryl earlier in the evening.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

My son walked in to us talking about "Head Count" (number of people you fucked) the other day and we all convinced him we were talking about how old we were when we tried alcohol.

"But Mum said 1, that's like really young"

"Ah but back in our day we had Rum put on our dummies to help teething"

Also chloroform on their pillow-cases gets to sleep in minutes.

bitchkat ,

It was whiskey they used according to my Mum.

jumjummy ,

I have an automation that keeps track of which kid’s turn it is to empty the dishwasher. Keeps track of when dishes are done with a power meter on the dishwasher itself.

Double tap on the light switch nearby announces whose turn it is on the kitchen speakers.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

This I like. I've just threatened to give the kids money for chores and I'm trying to work out how to automate it, and this is what I'm looking for

Lifebandit666 OP ,

https://github.com/IATkachenko/HA-SleepAsAndroid is the add on if anyone is interested and this is the app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid.sleep which I paid for premium long ago and have shared that premium with family account to my son's phone too, well worth buying.

When my alarm goes off my hallway light and the lamp on the far side of the room turn on low and the alarm remains silent for a minute, then ramps the volume up.

This means I can get up and not wake Wifey, huge WAF benefits...

I turn the alarm off and HA waits for the motion sensor in the hallway to pick me up, then the far lamp goes off. The next motion sensor on the floor below turns the hallway light off and the front room lights on for me (while the motion sensors do their usual stuff, this is extra).

I also used to use this automation to turn the "I'm sleeping" switch off but I haven't set my sleeping up properly again yet.

If I snooze, the lights go off again and come on when snooze is finished the same as an alarm.

Now to set up my teenage Son's alarm, he was nearly late to school once this week which is unheard of

ErwinLottemann ,

fyi if you use the homeassistent app HA knows (if enabled) the time of your next set alarm (it's in the sensor settings for the app)

Lifebandit666 OP ,

You are correct, but when I've used it there was disparities between the time and what it reported the time was. It was out by an hour because of BST.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • incremental_games
  • homeassistant@lemmy.world
  • meta
  • All magazines
    •