Arguably, I find automations make a smart home truly smart rather than perks like voice control do. What are your favourite automations running at home?
I’ve got Emby tied into HA and it auto dims the lights on playback/pause if it’s dark with a toggle in HA to override.
A “night mode” button that starts my white noise MPD playlist in the bedroom and sets the speaker zone/volume, turns off all the lights/decorations, turns on one bulb in the living room overhead lights to 1% (just enough to navigate around furniture), and turns the bedroom lamps on to medium brightness with a 10 minute auto-off.
Overhead lights and lamps tied into a common dimmer and can select different modes (lamps only, overhead only, both, etc) and color temps. Overhead lights are set to be proportional to the lamps to keep the light levels even (unless overridden to “Chernobyl mode” which disables the overhead light limiter).
My “TV” is just a PC connected to a large dumb monitor upstairs and a projector downstairs. Wrote a MQTT agent in Python to control turning the screen on/off, volume, and other settings. This is to allow HA to turn the screen/projector on/off .
Have more, but those are the ones I’m using this moment.
I have A LOT of automations. Some of my favorites are:
- Automatically set “house state” (morning, day, evening, night, not home, etc.") based on alarm state, time of day, last movement, etc - this state controls a lot of other automations
- Push message to my phone if outside camera detect a person when house state is “night” or “not home” (using Frigate for object detection)
- Automatically turn off lights at night or when not home. Automatically set lights to right level when home
- Push message when window has been open for more than 20 minutes.
- Push message if windows or doors are open when leaving the house or at night
- Push message with “morning update” and “evening update”. Including today’s weather, if I should sell some stocks as price has reached threshold, etc.
Basically, I no longer has to remember to turn on of off lights and if I forget something important in the house (such as an open window or turning on the alarm), it reminds me to do so (if it can’t do it itself)
A bunch of little things:
- when I hit the small button on my inovelli bedroom switch, it turns on my bedside tables, turns off all other lights, and closes my blinds
- when it sees my living room and bedroom tv’s on at the same time, it turns off my bedroom. My damn remote triggers both tv’s power when I’m in the living room
- flashing my kitchen lights if my deep freezer door is ajar
- opening my blinds in the morning automatically, and closing them at dusk.
- adaptive lighting with hue bulbs
I did a few small automation for my car and the charger.
When I plug in the charger at home, it will check the current electricity prices and if below a certain threshold it will setup a plan to charge in those hours.
I also have a button I can press to make a plan depending on how many kwh I need as well as when I need it.
It will then automatically start and stop the charger based on these plans
In Progress, needs tweaking:
Making sure our AC only turns on when it can efficiently cool the house. Useful when we dip into the 50’s for lows while it’s 70’s+ during the day. Basically switch the thermostat to heat only to avoid the AC coming on.In the planning stage:
Presence sensing in our bathroom to turn the light on for my dad in the middle of the night. Can’t use PIR motion detection as my dad moves very slow these days and actually defeats the PIR sensor in our hallway night light. I’m thinking mmWave is the way to go. Might try presence sensing when someone is on the toilet, turn the fan on, again, because sometimes he forgets.Just getting started really with automations right now.
Just a tip: You can also automate the bathroom fan with a timer to turn off after 30 min or whatever, since you want it to run for a bit but not all night.