I figured we could all share some of the cooler things we’ve done to get the conversation moving in here.
Here are some of the automations I’m proud of and get the most use out of.
Blinds and Lighting
- Open and close the blinds (Ikea Fyrtur) according to the light levels outside
- If a window is open, the blind will only close to 50%, but it will close automatically after the window is closed
- Turn all lights off when the blinds are opened, and turn lights on in occupied rooms when the blinds are closed
- Automatically close the blinds in the bedroom and bathroom when the shower is on. Open them after we leave the master suite.
Websites
- (Selenium) Auto login to Amazon to check on the status of my Kindle daily reading streak and notify me if I forget to read. We must keep the streak intact!
- Auto categorize new transactions in YouNeedABudget and mark them as approved, as well as pull my net worth into Home Assistant
- Get my most-listened to tracks and artists from Last.FM and pull those into Home Assistant
- Notify me if there are documents in my Paperless-NGx server that need to be categorized and filed
Reminders
- When I walk in the door, announce any outstanding Todoist tasks marked with the @alert label so I know to do it before I sit down. Examples are to change the furnace filter or Venmo my friend for Youtube TV
- I run OCR on the camera feed from my garage camera to determine whether the bins are in the garage. The bins say Trash and Recycling on top, so I look for those words in the image. If they are in the garage in the evening before trash day, I receive an alert
Media and Torrenting
- Notify me and display a badge in Home Assistant when there is a pending request in Overseerr
- (Selenium) Log into my favorite private torrent tracker website from Node-RED to check whether I need to take any actions
HVAC
- Preheat or pre-cool the house prior to peak electricity pricing going into effect. During peak hours, auto adjust the thermostat to prevent it from running
- Turn the thermostat off if there are windows open. Automatically restore previous setting (cool or heat) when all windows are closed.
- Turn the bathroom fan on after the shower is turned off and no one is around. Turn it off after 80 minutes or the humidity in the bathroom is within 10% of the humidity in the bedroom, whichever comes first.
Misc
- Node-RED monitors the status of my UPSes for my servers. If the battery drops below 50% while the power is out, it initiates graceful shutdowns of my Synology and other servers
- Auto sort the Home Assistant grocery list upon adding a new item
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I’ve got a few fun ones:
At night, my cat sometimes gets the zoomies, so I have a projector pointed at a wall with a motion sensor. When he goes on his tear through the house while we’re sleeping, the projector turns on and plays a video of strings moving on the wall. This tires him out without him screaming at us to play with him. It turns off again after a few minutes with no motion.
The lights and Roku screens in my office are on a motion sensor, but are also linked with a seat sensor so they don’t turn off when I’m at my desk. Sitting at the desk also sends a Wake on LAN packet to my computer. Sitting at my electronics workbench changes the lights to bright white with another seat sensor.
Lights (HA), desktop wallpaper (with Wallpaper Engine), and in-computer RGB (using OpenRGB) change from blue/pink during the day to dark red/orange at sunset so being in my office late doesn’t mess with my sleep.
A macro button next to my keyboard disables my screens and turns on a fan pointed at my VR area for workouts.
Love the cat one! That’s a unique take on home automation that I have never encountered before.
Those are very original!
How do you detect the zoomies?!?
I just have a motion sensor in a hallway his zoom pattern follows. It’s not between the bedroom and the bathroom, so it would only trigger with the cat or a burglar (the automation is inactive during the day).
I’ve been using Home Assistant for a while but I don’t have a ton of IoT devices so I don’t have a ton of automations set up.
My most useful though is an alert that triggers when my garage door has been open for ten minutes, and then again every ten minutes after until it has been open for an hour when it will automatically close.
Accidentally left the garage door open all night at least twice before this and thankfully nothing happened but the automation has prevented this at least twice as well.
Also gives me peace of mind in case I accidentally open it when I’m away.
@Toribor @ilikedatsyuk Same!
Some hacked together sharp ir sensors have worked way better than I expected.
https://github.com/DerekParks/GarageDoorIRSensorI built out this GarHAge setup which uses magnetic reed switches for state detection. I’ve considered that a reed switch getting bumped might get it stuck in a loop of endlessly opening and closing though and tried to care for that possibility in my automations.
Really I just need to get an IP camera for piece of mind when I’m traveling. Even if the state detection is broken I can ensure that it’s closed and disable the automation until I can repair it.
I’m tracking my HVAC filter and rest it’s 90days with an NFC tag
Loosely followed an online how-to to create a tracking chore list using NFC tags for my son’s allowance. Automations to nag him on trash night to gather/take out the trash.
A simple Automation that turns on a fan in the basement when the outside temp is above out AC setting to help distribute cool basement air.
Outside security lights on/off at dusk/dawn
House auto arms/disarms (Alarmo) when everyone leaves or someone arrives (via life 360 integration)
On trash day, after noon if my son scans (NFC) one of the trash cans, the garage door opens to let him in/put them away.
My son gets a notification when he comes home from school if we got mail (aka the mailbox was opened that day)
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
I’m using HA to track device usage of my kids, and I can give them bonus time if they do something nice or a chore. And, negative time when they misbehave. Perhaps an idea for you?
What are you using to track/control the screentime?
Yeah that’s quite complicated as e.g. Family Link (which we use on their Android devices) doesn’t have an API.
- Input boolean per child “Device in use”
- platform_history sensor to track how long it was on in a week.
- I’ve installed the Home Assistant app on their devices, whenever it turns on for more than a minute, it turns on the boolean input.
- They also play on the xbox together during the day. Whenever the xbox turns on, and they log out my account, it also triggers an automation to turn on both switches.
- Input helper with weekly device limit (time)
- template sensors that calculate the time left
- Switch can be manually turned on/off via our Home Assistant tablet in the living room, which also displays the remaining time etc.
It’s very custom and sometimes buggy, e.g. this morning the xbox sensor suddenly become “On” despite the xbox being turned off. So I’ve also added some custom helpers to be able to decrease/increase the usage for that week if something had gone bonkers.
I love my door sensor announcements. Garage opens? Google Home goes “GARAGE OPEN”. Front door blows open at 11pm because it wasn’t closed properly? “FRONT DOOR OPEN… all home lights come on”
Just security stuff. So much customization that other products don’t offer.
My tankless hot water heater is controlled via Home Assistant too. Shuts off the circulation loop at 11pm~630am. Saves a ton of gas!
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- All my lights turn on and off based on motion sensors
- Through the unofficial community Mila integration, I control my air purifiers based on different circumstances, like whether the house is empty.
- Collect indoor air quality info from my Airthings to view in Grafana
@OutrageousUmpire
I hadn’t heard of the Mila air purifiers, how well does the HACS integration work? I might pick a few of these up! #HomeAssistantThe integration works just fine. My only issue with my Milas is that the smart features connect over the cloud. They say they have an update adding Homekit support soon but have been saying that for two years
Turning on heated blankets at night, turn off after I plug in my phone to charge.
Climate control in every room.
Made dumb standing desk is now smart and goes up and down randomly every 45-60 minutes while I’m working.
I don’t have a lot of automations yet, but a really useful one has been using smart plugs to detect when the laundry machines are running so that Home Assistant can send alerts when they finish.
That’s a great one! We have an automation like that too, though we sometimes wish we could remain blissfully ignorant that the laundry is done.
How would you detect that? If the load goes to zero was my initial thought but it can also be pausing during the program when that happens.
So I solved this by just having it trigger when load goes to zero and stays there for a couple minutes (might be some trial and error depending on washing machine). This means I don’t get alerts exactly when its done, but the alert is more likely to be correct that it is done.
For me one of my favourites are my extractor fan control in my bathrooms. I have a switch on the fan and a humidity sensor close by. Turn on the shower and the extractor will turn on until the humidity is lowered enough, then switch off. In addition I have a static programmable button to press should you need it for other reasons. I just love the world of entities and how they link together to make something functional.
The ones I use the most are:
- Turning on lights and setting specific scenes when I turn on TVs in my bedroom, living room and theater room.
- Brighten lights whenever Plex is paused or finishes playing, which is great in a dedicated home theater where the lighting is very dark when watching a movie. This has actually helped improve many hang out nights with friends because the moment after a movie finishes is less awkward, leading more naturally into a nice conversation before every heads home.
- Reminder notifications for when washing machine or dryer cycles finish, or when my garage door has been open for more than 15 minutes (unless I override that with a toggle on my dashboard).
- Turning off all of my lights and switches when I leave the house, unless a boolean variable is flipped (e.g. if someone else is at my house w/o me, which is unusual since I live alone). Well, not quite everything, there are a few devices like a couple power monitoring smart pugs that always remain on.
Which addon did you use for the paperless-ngx integration?
No special addon. I use a Node-RED flow to query the Paperless-NGx API to find the number of documents with the “intake” tag. Here’s a template.
Instructions:
- Create an API token for Paperless-NGx by going to http://<PAPERLESS_URL_WITH_PORT>/admin/authtoken/tokenproxy/ and clicking Add Token
- Import the flow into Node-RED
- Take the token you’ve created in step 1 and paste it over the <PAPERLESS_TOKEN> placeholder in the “Headers” function node
- Change the URL in the “Make API Request” HTTP node to point towards your Paperless-NGx installation
- Replace the debug node at the end with whatever you want. I personally use a Sensor node to import the value into Home Assistant.
One of my favorites is setup with a large (1242 LED’s) WLED strip on my front porch. I have a motion sensor that is setup to trigger a switch to a bright white when the strip is on or if we get home and the presence detection picks us up and sets the strip to stay that way for a certain amount of time. The strip has a few different random settings that it can use when turning on as well so one night it may be a rainbow and another night it may be a solid color that walk around the strip changing one LED at a time. Comes on automatically at sunset and turns off at 11pm but until 6 am the strip can still come on with motion or presence detection.
The other one controls my electric water heater. I have 3 temp sensors, one near the top heating element location, one near the bottom element heating location, and a third on the water output line. The original temp controllers are still in place and set the maximum temp so the tank can never go over acceptable levels even if the ESP8266 fails in an on mode. Then I let the temp ramp down at a certain time of the evening and ramp back up in the morning for use throughout the day. But lets say you come home late and need a shower, when the output temp goes over a certain point after the system has started to ramp down it will kick the heater back into it’s regular mode until the temp drops below a certain threshold. It also uses the HA app to track where we are located and I have two zones that keep the water heater going, those are home which just barely covers the property and near home which is within about 30 miles of home. Once everyone who is tracked goes outside of those zones the temp ramps back down to the overnight setting and ramps back up when we get into the near home zone.
I have a ton of other things I want to implement like lights that turn on red automatically after a certain time of day so you can walk around at night and not kill your night vision. Right now I am working on the house as the electrical, plumbing, and a ton of other stuff needed work. But when I am done my cheap old $18K house will be a fully integrated smart home.
I’m impressed, my best I feel is to turn on the outside fans when a person is detected and the temp is over 86 (I don’t know why I picked 86, seemed appropriate at the time)
I have some arbitrary temps in my system too. I also have our bed warmer automated to turn on each night, but only if it’s <=60 F outside.
A few automations are running in my house:
- Turned the nightstand light into a wake-up light, which distinguishes between weekdays and weekends,
- Kitchen light turns on and off based on sunset and midnight with random offset respectively,
- Garbage collection notifications,
- Introduced an extra (wireless) light switch in the hallway, which controls a Shelly connected to the light. The original light switch is still intact, however it is positioned at an unconvenient location.
In the coming period I want to:
- Automate the shutters and combine that with a light sensor.
- Introduce a routine that starts the washing machine and/or drying during the day based on the amount of incoming solar power. Not sure yet how to do this, since the washing machine has a physical start button via touch.
How did you manage to get selenium working with Amazon!? I can’t get it to work well. Amazon always thinks I’m a bot and blocks access. Which is right but still.
